Palo Alto-based startup PIP Labs announced an $80 million funding round for Story Protocol, a blockchain platform to track intellectual property rights in the era of artificial intelligence and the data scraping that enables model training. CEO and co-founder Seung Yoon “SY” Lee says the company aims to create a more sustainable IP environment for digital consumers and builders. The raise, led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and Polychain Capital, values the startup at $2.25 billion. The move comes after Sahara AI announced it raised $43 million this month to fund a blockchain-based IP tracking system.

As AI use explodes, being able to track IP and document its provenance has the potential to return a lot of money to rightsholders, TechCrunch points out, quoting Lee saying that with Story, “anyone can fork and remix your IP permissionlessly while you capture the upside.”

“Onramping tokenized IP unlocks a whole world of possibilities, giving creators the ability to exchange, grow, and distribute their creativity,” the Story website explains. The emergence of companies like Story and Sahara AI aim to rebalance the equity between content creators, owners and companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Stability AI and others.

Those companies have “scraped data and rode rough-shod over others’ intellectual property when training and operating their foundational models,” TechCrunch writes.

CNBC notes the Series B funding round is typically the third, and says the $2.25 billion valuation was sourced anonymously as that information “has not been made public.”

TechCrunch says Story is not yet profitable and “riding high on hopes from backers that its solution will give creators the ability to be attributed and compensated for work that gets fed into popular artificial intelligence platforms such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Perplexity’s AI-powered search engine.”

CNBC explains that Story and other companies in the new wave of IP protection seek to leverage the blockchain’s distributed database, which is said to maintain immutable activity records.

Story “works to protect individuals and entities’ IP by embedding terms associated with it, such as licensing fees and royalty-sharing arrangements, into smart contracts,” which are “digital contracts stored on a blockchain that automatically execute once a certain set of terms are met,” CNBC notes.

“One of the benefits of blockchain technology is that it runs peer-to-peer and allows for the creation of programmable, readable and writable metadata that can represent IP rights and agreements between parties,” writes SiliconANGLE.