Yakoaan NFT fraud detection startup, has raised $4.8 million to build tools to combat intellectual property fraud on web3, the company exclusively told TechCrunch.
One of the most common attacks Yakoa sees is people making copies of NFTs and claiming them as their own work, said Andrew Dworschak, the startup’s co-founder.
Yakoa provides tools and an indexer that detects copying or likely infringement in original NFTs, ranging from outright counterfeiting to partial or stylistic counterfeiting, which will then notify platforms, brands or creators of these fraudulent activities.
The funding round was led by Collab+Currency, Volt Capital, and Brevan Howard Digital, with participation from Data Community Fund, Alliance DAO, Uniswap Labs Ventures, Orange DAO, Time Zero Capital, gmjp, Sunset Ventures, and FAST by GETTYLAB, as well as like angel investors.
The capital will be used to grow its machine learning and data engineering teams internally, according to Graham Robinson, co-founder of Yakoa.
The platform identifies the first existence of an NFT on various blockchains such as Ethereum, Solana, Avalanche, Polygon, and more.
“In terms of blockchains, having every blockchain is on our roadmap,” Dworschak said. “The belief we have is that it doesn’t matter where you coin IP or post an address, what matters is that it’s publicly verifiable.”
Anyone can make “quick money with anyone,” Dworschak said. “It’s really hard to protect against these things because there are so many assets. In some cases [fraudsters are] photoshopping and cropping or changing colors, when in fact they are using someone else’s IP.”
“When we do an attribution search, we try 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 is entirely appropriate. There are a lot of edge cases that we need to look at and others that arise similarly and some use cases that we take as a platform and give people the opportunity to register their opinion.”
“The entire ecosystem is open and we want to continue to make sure that it stays that way,” Robinson said. “We are trying to create the tools for the industry to use and for them to use in their environment.”
The name Yakoa comes from the saying “A-OKAY,” but backwards, Dworschak said. “When he uses the blockchain, he wants to make sure it’s ‘A-OK’, which is why we call it that.”
Today, the NFT market “has already shown great potential,” Dworschak said. “He has created asset types that are not tied to a specific platform allowing creators to publish their assets and trade them freely across platforms. It is a completely new method of trading and it will be extended to what is unimaginable today.”
Long-term fraud protection will be something that can be run on the backend of the platforms, Robinson said. “There are a lot of services that can start from this IP protection.”
