OpenOrigins, a company founded to protect content authenticity through a provenance-focused blockchain, has expanded globally with a 拢3.5 million seed investment.
The round was led by Galaxy Interactive with participation from Galaxy Ventures and existing investor Unbound, a global investment firm led by Shravin Bharti Mittal.
During the past year, OpenOrigins signed major partnerships and clients with leading media companies such as ITN, which produces content for Channel 4 and ITV. Its decentralised content anchoring and authenticity verification solution aims to bring believability back into the global content and media industry in the age of generative AI.
鈥淲e are seeing fabricated content threaten our trust in information ecosystems, destabilise political environments and rapidly increase corporate fraud,鈥� said Ari Abelson, co-founder of OpenOrigins.
鈥淲ithout an immutable mechanism to prove the authenticity of content, the internet will become a collective fiction, where people can鈥檛 believe anything they see. Now is the time to safeguard non-synthetic content, establishing provable provenance, so we can share our stories, and always be believed.鈥�
The company鈥檚 custom-built blockchain, anchoring solutions and real-time camera-capture technologies protect and prove the authenticity of images and videos, providing a way for people, companies, and governments to reliably operate on fact.
Once an image鈥檚 provenance has been validated on the blockchain, OpenOrigins is able to globally distribute this media and license it on behalf of the content provider while proving the content鈥檚 original authenticity.聽
The company began as an academic project at the University of Cambridge, while Dr Manny Ahmed completed his PhD.
鈥淎I advancements are rapidly outpacing any AI detectors or retroactive solutions to authenticating content 鈥� it鈥檚 a losing arms race,鈥� added co-founder Ahmed.
鈥淥ur approach is sustainable, what鈥檚 proven to be true today will still be true a decade down the line. We leverage the immutable quality of blockchains to combat AI.聽
鈥淏y proving content at source, we can guarantee what is human-created and what isn鈥檛. In our minds, purpose built blockchains are the only acceptable solution for trust online in a world of AI.鈥�