Collab+Currency, Volt Capital, and Brevan Howard Digital led the round, with backing from Alliance DAO, Uniswap Labs Ventures, Orange DAO, Time Zero Capital, Data Community Fund, gmjp, Sunset Ventures, FAST by GETTYLAB, and several angels.
Yakoa’s fraud protection service is live, keeping unsafe assets away from Web3 platforms, and giving creators and brands a map of where copies of their content are surfacing. The service has already indexed NFTs across major blockchains and analyzed them with state-of-the-art AI to catch fraud before it ever reaches the consumer.
Soona Ahmaz, Managing Partner at Volt Capital “We initially caught wind of Yakoa after they partnered with Genie, a popular NFT aggregator that was recently acquired by Uniswap Labs. Yakoa provides a powerful fraud detection engine as well as valuable, complementary product features that simply aren’t offered by competitors.”
Scott Gray, Founder of Genie and Head of NFT Products at Uniswap Labs, believes that “in a decade, most of the world’s intellectual property will be stored on blockchains. Their mediums will range from virtual worlds, to marketplaces, social, and publishers. Yakoa is protecting creators and their communities from fraudulent infringements. We’re going to see the world’s largest brands and NFT collections leveraging Yakoa to protect their IP across all experiences.”
NFTs are a leap forward in our relationship with content, allowing creators to take platform-independent ownership of their work. At the same time, untangling who did what from a chain of endless reworks and content remixes has become an insurmountable task. In the Web3 world, it’s now easier to be a bad actor than it is to be a genuine creator. Rug-pulls are commonplace, fraudulent works plague every major platform, and user trust is at an all-time low.
Stephen McKeon, Partner at Collab+Currency said: “If we hope to onboard the masses to Web3, it is imperative to make Web3 technology more user-friendly. A big part of that mission is creating tools to mitigate fraud and deception, which is exactly what Yakoa is solving.”
But it’s not enough to match the standard for trust and safety consumers have come to expect in traditional commerce when Web3 technology provides an opportunity to raise the bar. This fundraise allows Yakoa to do just that by servicing more creators, platforms, and brands.
Yakoa started when Andrew Dworschak, Co-Founder and CEO, was studying intellectual property law at Stanford and discovered that his AI research was the missing link to safeguard NFTs. He said:
“We don’t often have the chance to rewrite the rules of commerce. But a multitude of factors, from growing blockchains to a powerful post-pandemic creative workforce, have created the perfect storm for NFT technology to blossom. As a result, the pool of data surrounding NFT transactions has grown faster than anyone’s ability to process it.
For the Yakoa team, that’s an enormous opportunity. We get to be the first team to tap into these massive datasets, to turn AI research into products, and to set the new standard for intellectual property rights.
It’s a big mission, but I’ve been amazed by the outpouring of excitement and support we’ve received. Our investors and customers include many of the most influential thought leaders in the industry, and our team has experts across the AI and IP domains. Having such diverse voices join together in a single conversation has been an eye-opening experience that has resulted in some truly groundbreaking products, and in this next phase of the company, I’m most excited to bring this conversation to a larger audience.”
About Yakoa: Yakoa is an NFT fraud detection network that protects creators and brands from misuse of their IP and screens misleading or inappropriate content away from Web3 platforms. Based in San Jose, California, the recent fundraise was reported in TechCrunch and the Block.
Visit Yakoa’s website to book a demo and explore career opportunities.
