(Ping! Zine Web Hosting Magazine) – ascribe is pleased to announce seed funding of $2M from Earlybird Venture Capital, Freelands Ventures, Digital Currency Group and angel investors from Silicon Valley, LA, Canada, Switzerland, and Germany. The investors have backed notable companies such as art-related Artsy, Auctionata, online photography community EyeEm and recently acquired 6Wunderkinder.
ascribe has the vision to build the ownership layer for the internet to help creators and content owners to register, track and transfer valuable digital work. Funding will help ascribe to serve early customers in art, photography, design, 3D and video.
ascribe allows artists and creators to easily own and license their intellectual property (IP). Artists can claim attribution and through the use of unique editions create scarcity in the fast growing digital art market. Designers can license their work securely. Marketplaces, content owners and consumers can manage and verify the authenticity of digital work. Digital creators can now share and monetize their work without losing attribution, and transfer copyright simply by sending an email.
ascribe CEO Bruce Pon, said “Creators should be able to protect and control their work. This funding allows us to continue to build innovative tools – which use blockchain technology and internet scale machine learning – to ensure that creators can protect their most valuable digital assets.”
Since going live in March, ascribe has seen rapid growth in customers and partnerships, and seeks to build upon that success with the funding and advisors provided by this seed round.
ascribe is also working on advanced web crawl technology that gives creators and content owners visibility on where their work spreads to on the internet.
Jonathan Monaghan, a New York based digital artist and early user, said “ascribe helps legitimize digital-based art work by providing a concrete system of authenticity. It is an important part of the ever-growing acceptance of computer-created work by the art world.”
About Ascribe
ascribe GmbH (http://www.ascribe.io) was founded in 2014 with the goal of building the ownership layer of the internet for creators. ascribe helps creators to manage their valuable digital creations by providing secure attribution, easy sharing and visibility. ascribe works closely with world-class creators, along with museums and digital marketplaces. ascribe’s founding team brings many decades of experience from the fields of technology, art, law, and finance.
About Earlybird Venture Capital
Established in 1997, Earlybird currently manages over €700 million ($900 million) in assets. It has backed more than 100 companies, some of which have sparked significant innovations in business and technology and resulted in large-scale IPOs and trade sales.
About Freelands Ventures
Freelands Ventures is an early stage investment fund that operates at the intersection of media, technology and entertainment. Freelands believe that success is shaped as much by access to great partners and networks as it is by capital. It provides internal strategic and operational experience and a world-class network of media, brand and talent relationships to help accelerate the growth of its portfolio companies. Freelands is based in London but invests wherever it finds the most brilliant teams.
About Digital Currency Group
Digital Currency Group (DCG) is helping to build the foundation of the bitcoin and blockchain technology industry by launching, incubating, and investing in groundbreaking companies that will transform the global financial services ecosystem and usher in the “internet of value”. DCG has been an active seed investor in the digital currency industry with over 50 investments in 15 countries.