Story Protocol completes US$25 million Series A financing why a16z led the investment

Written by: Golden Finance 0xjs

On September 6, 2023, the on-chain IP protocol Story Protocol announced the completion of a $25 million Series A financing, led by a16z crypto.

Together with the $29.3 million in financing completed in May this year, Story Protocol’s total financing exceeds $54 million, with investors including Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Hashed and TPG Capital’s David Bonderman.

On September 6, Sriram Krishnan, a partner of a16z, posted an article on the official website explaining why he led the investment in Story Protocol.

I grew up fascinated by movies, TV and comics. Whether it was Batman, Superman, Star Trek, Harry Potter or The Lord of the Rings, like millions of others, they formed (and still do) a huge part of my childhood.

As soon as I had access to the Internet, I started discussing these things with fans from all over the world on the early fan sites, back in the early 2000s. Even then, I was impressed by the creativity—whether it was fan fiction, original art, or entire novels that people wrote. However, there was no mechanism, that is, no agreement, to reconnect these cultural remixes with the original works that inspired them.

Fast forward a few decades, and the internet, and social networks in particular, have created a renaissance in composable creativity—social networks are awash with memes, second-guessing, and entire fan-created storylines.

But with this explosive growth comes challenges.

Today, Soundcloud has banned derivative works, videos with original soundtracks are removed from YouTube, and original artists are neither credited nor paid while their work survives. To this day, creative intellectual property, like early open source communities, remains gated and read-only, although multimedia series work attracts some of the most passionate and imaginative communities.

We believe that community and arrested development is one of the reasons why some of the most creative ideas don't make it to film, TV and long-form media.

This is where Story Protocol comes in.

Last year, we met the Story Protocol team, who have ambitions to solve these core problems. Their vision is to use the blockchain to track the provenance of original material and to incentivize and create community**.

This open protocol will give creators of all media—writing, images, audio, and video—the ability to track their work as it spreads across the Internet as it takes on new life. It will also reward those who re-create or modify original content into new content.

The team hopes to usher in the era of open source IP by being the protocol the collaborative world builds on. The next generation of the hit multimedia franchise puts ownership and community at its core.

We are extremely excited to partner with this founding team, who bring a unique combination of technical expertise and understanding of the media and entertainment industry.

SY Lee once founded Radish, a mobile serial fiction platform; Jason Levy once led content at Episode, a storytelling ecosystem; Jason Zhao was a product leader at Google's Deepmind, translating cutting-edge artificial intelligence research into customer-facing applications program.

That’s why I’m excited to announce that we’ve led Story Protocol’s $25 million Series A round and will be partnering with them to build on this vision.