a16z-backed crypto firm rebrands, shifts focus to solving AI’s global copyright headache

Palo Alto-based blockchain startup Story Protocol is rebranding as DATA Foundation and shifting its focus entirely to AI training infrastructure, with Kled founder Avi Patel joining the organization in an advisor position as chief data officer, Patel told CoinDesk in an email interview on Thursday.

The DATA Foundation will operate the DATA Network, an onchain registry designed to verify the origins, licensing and consent history of datasets used to train artificial intelligence models. The pivot moves the firm from targeting the broader intellectual property market to the specialized AI data sector, Patel said.

The startup’s shift comes as AI developers and Big Tech face mounting copyright lawsuits over the data used to train their models and increasing pressure to prove that datasets were collected with proper consent. DATA Foundation is betting blockchain can provide a transparent record of ownership, licensing and provenance for AI training data.

The rebranding follows Story Protocol's $140 million in cumulative venture funding led by Andreessen Horowitz's a16z crypto, which Patel confirmed. He declined to comment on the valuation reported by Gate as $2.4 billion.

The protocol came under the spotlight in February due to a token unlock delay. Its co-founder Sy Lee defended the decision saying its blockchain needed “more time” to build usage.

Patel said the launch includes a direct integration with Kled AI, an opt-in human data marketplace. According to the company, the integration registers 1.5 billion user-contributed records on the new network. As part of the corporate shift, Andrea Muttoni takes over as CEO of the DATA Foundation.

AI firms face growing legal scrutiny and data exhaustion from scraping the public internet, Patel said. DATA Foundation plans to address this by launching Trace, a public audit and search platform that creates unalterable cryptographic receipts for individual data contributions. The receipts are designed to help AI developers verify the provenance, licensing and consent history of datasets before using them.

"Trace publishes the audit record, not the data," Patel told CoinDesk. "What's public is the receipt: content hash, consent terms, licensing, payment proof and timestamps. There's nothing to scrape on Trace because the asset itself is not stored there."

Patel added that the underlying data remains inside the marketplace and requires a licensed transaction to access.

The network also incorporates Poseidon, an AI data processing project that cleans and scores human data. Poseidon runs a contributor app called Numo, which pays users stablecoins in real time for submitting authenticated data.

To fund these payouts, Patel said compensation is tied directly to completed transactions rather than advanced against future sales. Kled also runs fiat payout rails alongside the stablecoin option, so contributor payments do not depend on any single buyer's timing.

Patel said his team is focusing development on an upcoming fraud-detection protocol to confirm that data is real, human and original rather than pirated or AI-generated.

"Labs won't license data they can't verify," he said. "Solving that is the whole game, and it's where we're putting our resources."

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