“As the ‘decentralized blue checkmark’ for NFTs, Optic’s AI engine helps marketplaces, creators, and collectors detect counterfeit, derivative art and copyrighted materials in NFT content.”

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SAN FRANCISCO, CA — July 20, 2022‍

Optic, a web3 AI company, announced the completion of an US$11 million seed round of financing led by Kleiner Perkins and Pantera Capital, with participation from Greylock Partners, Lattice Capital, OpenSea, Circle, Polygon, CoinDCX, Neon DAO, Flamingo DAO, and others.

Founded in March 2022, Optic is developing an AI engine for NFT content recognition and makes results available to the web3 community through tools and APIs. Optic processes millions of new NFTs minted each day and offers automated monitoring tools that notify marketplaces, brands, and media IP owners. The system matches the content of new tokens against a set of authentic collections to understand if a token is original, if it contains inspired art or copyrighted materials, or if it's a blatant counterfeit.

Based on comparisons performed by OpenSea, Optic’s proprietary neural net, specifically designed for the NFT domain, has been proven to be the best in terms of match precision and recall. OpenSea has selected Optic as a partner in their recently announced quest to fight copymints. Optic processes 2TB of new NFTs coming to the site every day, detecting exact copymints and fuzzy matches, including flips, rotations, size and color changes, etc. Optic’s Marketplace Moderation Tool offers a full-featured, multi-user workflow for moderators to review match results and turn policies into automated actions.

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“OpenSea is proud to work closely with Optic to improve the authenticity of NFTs. Optic has developed world class software and tools in this space and we’re excited to partner with them in the journey to safeguard digital assets throughout the web3 ecosystem.”

Anne Fauvre-Willis | VP of Special Projects, OpenSea.

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Optic was founded by Andrey Doronichev, a former Director of Product at Google who led Youtube’s Mobile team, at the time when YouTube built its ContentID system to fight piracy. His co-founders, Roman Doronin and Vlad Vinogradov, are world-class AI researchers and former founders of EORA Data Lab, an AI studio that designed proprietary image retrieval neural nets and delivered dozens of AI projects for brands like PepsiCo, Nestlé, and Yandex.

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“We created Optic with a vision to become the ‘decentralized blue checkmark’ for NFTs—a protocol that gives the power to validate NFT collections and moderate content back to the web3 community, to fight scam and encourage legitimate creative collaboration. By building a cross-chain content recognition AI, essentially a missing piece of core NFT infrastructure, we strive to make web3 the safest, most transparent, and profitable creator ecosystem to date.”

Andrey Doronichev | Co-founder and CEO, Optic.

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With this round of financing, Optic will invest heavily in building core AI infrastructure and defining a decentralized protocol. The company will recruit talent in research and engineering to accelerate product development. In the near-term, Optic plans to release new tools for NFT creators, collectors, as well as a public API for web3 developers.

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“Trust and safety are paramount to the success of web3, and especially the NFT ecosystem. Optic has built a highly performant and scalable solution for trust and authenticity of NFTs. We are thrilled to lead Optic’s seed financing and partner with them to help millions of consumers and creators connect and transact with confidence.”

Ilya Fushman | Partner, Kleiner Perkins.

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“Pantera is proud to back Optic in its journey to solve the tremendous problem of NFT and media legitimacy. The team really understands the pain points around NFT authenticity, has produced AI infrastructure that is tailored toward our industry, and has demonstrated a real need by partnering with the largest NFT marketplace in OpenSea. Optic’s solution is necessary to expand NFTs to the mainstream.”

Paul Veradittakit | Partner, Pantera Capital.

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“Despite digital assets being verifiable on-chain, the NFT landscape has been riddled with fraud and gross abuse. We were blown away with the Optic team’s ability to build powerful AI enabled weapons to combat this threat for some of the largest players in web3 today, and believe they can bring more long-term trust to the growing universe of digital goods.”

Mike Zajco | Partner, Lattice Capital.

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About Optic

Optic is a content recognition engine for web3. We monitor blockchains to reveal the origins of any NFT and how it’s been reimagined, remixed or copied. Prevent fraud, preserve value, and encourage collaborations you’ll be proud of. As an infrastructure layer for NFT verification, Optic is trusted by marketplaces, creators, developers, and collectors to authenticate NFTs and combat fraud, protecting original works and brand assets from third-party infringement.