NFT Startup Optic Raised $11 Million, Hopes to Boost AI for NFT Authentication

NFT startup Optic recently raised $11 million during a seed round led by venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins and crypto investment company Pantera Capital. According to Optic co-founder and CEO Andrey Doronichev, the fresh funds will be used to construct Optic’s cost-intensive infrastructure as well as expand its engineering talent. Investors that participated during the round include Lattice Capital, OpenSea, Circle, Polygon, CoinDCX, Neon DAO, and Flamingo DAO.

Doronichev affirmed that “without Optic, there is no real ‘NF’ in NFT.” He elaborated that humans are unable to differentiate unique and counterfeit NFTs at the surface level. Hence, the startup is currently working on an artificial intelligence (AI) engine to authenticate NFTs. The AI will process newly minted NFTs every day. Additionally, it will also compare the works to existing NFT collections.

Optic’s AI engine is on the lookout for visual similarities. These may include lipped images, color changes, or slight distortions. It will then inform marketplaces, brands, or media companies about potential intellectual property violations should these similarities be found. To provide a metric, Optic shows a percentage for how much a particular token matches existing NFT collections. Doronichev claims that tokens that score below 95% most likely consist of inspired or derivative art.

Prominent NFT marketplace OpenSea has already integrated the startup’s Marketplace Moderation tool in its effort to suppress fraud. However, Doronichev explains that “Optic isn’t an enforcement business. Our goal is to make the information available and transparent to the ecosystem. Artists and marketplaces can decide what to do with it.”

Optic is also planning to introduce a public application programming interface (API) for Web3 developers in the near term. Moreover, it hopes to provide new tools for NFT creators and collectors alike. “People think of authenticity and all sorts of fraud and trust issues in the NFT space as a problem of a single marketplace or a single chain or a single creator or community,” Doronichev added. “That’s not true. That’s a systemic ecosystem issue, and it has to be addressed.”

Source: CoinDesk