AI-powered start-up Optic secures $11m to fight NFT fraud
Funding will help San Francisco firm develop an AI engine for authenticating NFT content
San-Francisco based Optic, a start-up that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to authenticate digital assets and non-fungible tokens (NFTs), has closed an $11m seed funding round.
It was led by Kleiner Perkins and US hedge fund Pantera Capital, with participation from Greylock Partners, Lattice Capital, OpenSea, Circle, Polygon, CoinDCX, Neon DAO and Flamingo DAO.
Optic, which only launched just a few months ago, is led by former Google product executive Andrey Doronichev, as well as AI experts Roman Doronin and Vlad Vinogradov.
“We’re building AI infrastructure for authenticating NFTs to fight fraud and enable collabs,” said Doronichev as he announced the seed funding round on Twitter.
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Verifying NFT ownership remains complex
Duplicates and plagiarised crypto art remains an industry-wide issue within the NFT ecosystem as thousands of NFTs are created each day with little technology to verify their origins. One major player tackling this problem is OpenSea, the largest NFT marketplace that processes thousands of new NFTs every day.
Earlier this year, OpenSea announced that it will ramp up its efforts to prevent duplicates and use image recognition software and AI to tackle counterfeit NFTs in a bid to boost trust in the Web 3.0 ecosystem. It is also working in partnership with Optic to support NFT content recognition and to trace the origins of a token by notifying users if an NFT is original or counterfeit.
According to its website: “Optic gives people superpowers to look across the internet and see how far any NFT has traveled and how it’s changed along the way.
“So if someone falls in love with what you’ve made and creates incredible art with it, you’ll know. And if someone crops your image and claims it as their original work, you’ll know that too.”
