SignSplit said it has raised a $400 million seed round with fintech ecosystem W Group as the sole funder. The company says its platform “enables people and institutions to protect, license and contribute their data, work and likeness.” The seed funding values the company at $1 billion and, the company added, entails a combination of capital “with a multi-year package of strategic resources to support SignSplit’s global rollout.”
SignSplit’s funding and valuation
SignSplit named W Group as the sole investor in the round. W Group is led by Volodymyr Nosov, who is best known as the founder of cryptocurrency exchange WhiteBIT; the group includes WhiteBIT and other companies. In June, Nosov became a co-owner of Dutch luxury carmaker Spyker. SignSplit is the latest investment from the group.
“SignSplit brings a new standard for the use of individuals’ and institutions’ data, work and likenesses,” Nosov said in the company’s funding announcement. “We believe that every serious participant in AI and the data economy will come to rely on SignSplit’s infrastructure. The scale of our commitment reflects both how early we believe we are, and how important we believe these solutions are for every industry that relies on human data.”
SignSplit, AI and creator protection
The company positions its platform and services as a response to concerns from actors, musicians and other creators about the emerging AI era and how to participate in the AI economy on fair terms. SignSplit describes its “signed data” solutions as a protection and also as a way for “people and institutions to proactively participate in that future.”
Some performers have already taken steps to protect their likenesses: “In January of this year, Matthew McConaughey filed for a series of trademarks to deter AI misuse of his likeness and voice, and in April, Taylor Swift followed with similar filings,” the company noted.
SignSplit CEO and Cofounder Alessandro Monterosso said: “SignSplit provides solutions for a world where the boundary between human experience and technology is becoming increasingly fluid. As AI reaches further into the real world, human knowledge, creativity, skills and identity will become increasingly connected to how technology evolves and interacts with the world around us. We believe SignSplit and the use of signed data can become the bridge between the two, connecting human contribution with protection, participation and compensation as technology advances.”
Use cases and data quality
SignSplit sees use cases across the sciences, healthcare, media and entertainment, with robotics and AI companies among the intended customers. A key selling point for those customers is data quality: “We saw that the next generation of AI would need more than additional data,” said SignSplit Cofounder, Executive Chairman, and Chief Product Officer Glib Denisov. “It would need higher-quality, real-world data with clear provenance, permission, and rights attached to it.”
