Quick take:
- Yakoa has raised $4.8 million in a funding round co-led by Collab+Currency, Volt Capital and Brevan Howard Digital.
- The web3 startup is building an NFT fraud detection tool that will protect creators’ intellectual properties from counterfeits.
- Data Community Fund, Alliance DAO, Uniswap Labs, Orange DAO, Time Zero, and Sunset Ventures also participated in the round.
Yakoa has completed a $4.8 million funding round co-led by Collab+Currency, Volt Capital and Brevan Howard Digital. The fundraising also attracted participation from Data Community Fund, Alliance DAO, Uniswap Labs Ventures, Orange DAO, Time Zero Capital, gmjp, Sunset Ventures and FAST by GETTYLAB.
Yakoa is a web3 startup focused on building tools for NFT fraud detection. The company said it will use the funds to accelerate the development of tools that will help fight intellectual property (IP) fraud in web3.
The company’s NFT fraud detection tool instantly identifies and tracks intellectual property infringements on-chain ranging from direct/partial copying to stylistic forgery. Upon identifying an infringement, Yakoa then notifies brands, platforms and creators of the infringement.
According to Andrew Dworschak, co-founder of Yakoa, one of the most common infringements occurs when people make copies of NFTs and claim to be their original works.
The company is now expanding the engineering teams behind the product as more blockchains integrate it into the ecosystems. Yakoa is already able to identify NFTs across multiple blockchains including Ethereum, Solana, Avalanche, and Polygon, among others.
Dworschak told TechCrunch that the platform wants to cover all blockchains in the future. “The belief we have is it doesn’t matter where you mint IP or publish an address, what matters is that it’s publicly verifiable,” he said.
Dworschak said it has become very easy for anyone to make money off people’s backs. The Yakoa co-founder highlighted simple forgery tactics like changing colour, cropping images and photoshopping as primary examples.
“When we’re doing an attribution search, we’re trying to figure out where an asset might be derived from and give as much information as we can,” Dworschak said. “Two assets can be similar and not fraudulent and that’s completely appropriate. There’s a lot of edge cases we need to be aware of and other ones that pop up in a similar vein and some use cases we take on as a platform and give people the chance to record their opinion.”
NFT fraud is a high-priority issue for creators, with leading platforms and marketplaces already deploying tools to try to protect their creative side of the community.
In May NFT fraud detection platform Doppel raised $5 million in a round backed by Solana Ventures, Polygon Studios, OpenSea Ventures, Dapper Labs and others to accelerate the development of its real-time, cross-chain monitoring service for detecting NFT fraud and counterfeits.
In June NFT fraud prevention startup Tovera acquired the NFT fraud detection tool SnifflesNFT to strengthen its fraudulent NFT image detection service, while Chainalysis said in May it was expanding its crypto fraud detection service to cover NFTs after completing a $170 million fundraising.
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