AI-powered NFT counterfeit detector MarqVision costs $20 million
MarqVision Inc., the developer of an artificial intelligence-powered platform for detecting counterfeit non-fungible tokens and physical goods, announced today that it has raised $20 million in early stage funding to create an intellectual property management system for brands.
DST Global and Atinum Investments were joined by previous investors Softbank Ventures, Bass Investment and Y-Combinator in this Series A round. That brings total funding for the company to $25 million after a seed funding round in October.
MarqVision’s technology helps its partners detect and remove counterfeits from over 1,500 online marketplaces and thousands of other rogue websites covering a wide swath of the global market. It uses AI to discover and enforce IP rights for clients, which include some of the most famous globally recognized brands, including Ralph Lauren and Pokemon.
“Creative assets are under attack in today’s digital world, with content owners largely unprotected as consumers are tricked into buying counterfeit goods and NFTs by sophisticated counterfeiters,” said Mark Lee, co-founder and CEO of MarqVision.
Non-fungible tokens are a type of crypto-asset that link ownership of virtual objects, such as artwork or digital video game items, using blockchain technology. The advantage is that it allows developers and users to create digital goods that they can then sell, buy and trade on online marketplaces to earn money from their own labor. The downside is that fraudsters can take a photo or other virtual asset they’ve found and pass it off as their own.
During the NFT market boom of 2021, plagiarized counterfeits became a huge problem in several marketplaces, including OpenSea, the largest NFT market. This included a counterfeit NFT artwork claiming to be made by political artist Banksy that sold for $336,000 to a British collector. Although the money was returned to the collector by the counterfeiter, it showed how easily problems could arise from the technology.
“The NFT landscape is a new frontier — and right now it’s operating a bit like the Wild West,” Lee said. “Brands are struggling to balance how to use their digital assets for marketing and sales purposes with protecting their intellectual property rights, as well as saving their customers from unknowingly buying fake NFTs.”
MarqVision’s NFT Protection pulls data from the largest marketplaces and uses text analytics and AI image models to detect infringing listings. On the dashboard, customers can view the flagged NFT entries and review them.
From there, they can decide if they need them removed. MarqueVision can also have a bot-powered reporting system that automatically reports fakes for removal when confidence is extremely high.
“This is a massive and complex problem, growing at tremendous speed,” Lee said of the NFT’s counterfeit detection system. “We give companies a way to fight back and defend their intellectual property.”
With the new funding, Lee said, the company will build the world’s first IP “operating system” that will give brand owners full control over their portfolios and manage their property rights. In this increasingly digital landscape, where listings can go up in seconds and can be bought and sold, he said, there needs to be a platform that can be both proactive and reactive to deal with the growing generation of fakes in real time.
“With this new round of funding, we can accelerate our mission to build the world’s first IP operating system to give brand owners full control over their IP portfolios,” Lee added.
Due to the rise of counterfeits, OpenSea added its own NFT plagiarism detector to its own marketplace in May in an effort to cut down on so-called “copymints.” Another example of a company trying to fight counterfeits is bitsCrunch Ltd. with Crunch DaVinci, which attempts to detect duplicate NFTs.
