Realizing that an ex-partner, unbeknownst to him, had put his private, intimate videos on a porn site, tech founder Dan Purcell was devastated. He vowed to find a solution to help prevent such violations from happening again. His Ceartas startup has now raised $4.5 million in a seed round from European VC Earlybird, as well as Upside VC, a fund founded by The Sidemen, a YouTube influencer group.

Ceartas DMCAwas founded in 2021 by Purcell (CEO) and Jonny Smyth (CTO), to apply AI to brand protection and anti-piracy services for content creators and brands.

It does this by de-indexing content and automatically issuing legal notices for pirated content.

Leveraging its proprietary AI platform, the company scans digital platforms to identify and eliminate unauthorized content, including deepfakes.

The platform claims to have significantly increased the visibility of problematic content on Google by 98%. It also claims to be able to deal with deep faxes.

Outside of Dublin and Berlin, the company plans to open an office in Los Angeles and has now signed partnerships with platforms such as OnlyFans and FanFix, (a content monetization platform for creators). .

On a call, Purcell told me: “I was dating a girl who was in the tech industry, and she asked me if I wanted to make some personal videos with her. About four or five years later, They all ended up on the Internet, and I was the last person to know,” he told me. “My girlfriend at the time slid her phone over the counter to me with the videos on it. It was pretty scary.”

He considered services that could help, but most were aimed at large enterprises rather than creators.

“There wasn't really anything out there to help people. So being an engineer, I built something myself… It would then send a legal copyright notice under the DMCA. That's how we launched in 2020. A year later, the content creation economy was booming and the app took off.

He told me that right now it's aimed at YouTubers and Instagrammers, but “as we get into the enterprise, we'll facilitate the service to take care of physical goods, such as counterfeit merchandise. The creators of this model have used it to create, essentially, a data set.

“Our service is fully automated. It's powered by AI. And when we look at the Google transparency reports, which I think were sent to you, you can see that (other platforms) overall The success rate is very low. This can put the content creator in a difficult legal situation because you can get in trouble for sending the wrong DMCA notice.

He added that the firm has a provisional patent on the model because it does not rely on any third-party technology.

Along with working with influencers like Sideman, they're also working with physical goods brands that put their content on social media.

The startup chose to work with Earlybird, Purcell said, because it was actively looking for a company in this brand protection space. : “We didn't actually go out and pitch them. They actually found us. They had been researching it since 2019. And they couldn't find anyone who would make money from it. Back to us. We actually Realized that these people understand the problem, because they are very technical and data focused.

Andre Retrath, partner at Early Bird Venture Capital, added in a statement: “In the media and entertainment industry, individuals and businesses alike face piracy challenges… Advanced AI training on large language models (LLM) has also have opened up avenues for the use and dissemination of unauthorized content.”

However, Ceartas is not the only player in this space. It has four main competitors in the brand protection space:

Rulta is a platform for protecting digital content and brand copyright violations, used by Twitch, OnlyFans, Twitter/X and Patreon. BranditScan is another one that offers similar services.

In the B2B brand protection space, Red Points out of Barcelona raised $106.6 million, while Vobile, which caters to majors in film and TV content, raised $181.6M.

All companies that submit DMCA notices, specifically to Google, are publicly identified and scored based on the accuracy of the takedown. This information is part of a public repository called the Google Transparency Report, and also the Lumen Database. On Google Web (they don't score image removal), Ceartas is listed as deleting 90 to 100% of URLs.

On Google's transparency index, Rulta is on. 63%On BranditScan 54%at red points 31%and on Vobile 42%.

These figures suggest that an AI-driven approach will take over from old delisting methods in the near future.

Ceartas claims it automates the delisting process and can quickly identify deepfakes.

Purcell said: “We basically built our dataset using ML. The AI ​​is context aware… the AI ​​will look at the page. It will use things like optical character recognition to look for watermarks. Ga, facial recognition… if it's more than 90%, it will automatically send a legal notice. If it's less than 90%, it's copyright Goes to an expert in. We work with a law firm in LA called Morrison Cooper.

The latest funding round is also backed by new angels: Thomas Hess (former president of Sony Music), Andrzej Henkler (10x founder), Michele Attisani and Niccolo Masto (Facet), and Ryan Morrison (Evolved Talent/Morrison Cooper). , Among others. From the fields of gaming, content creation, music, and television.