Shocked when his video was posted on a porn site, this founder came up with the idea for an AI startup

Image credits: LR Johnny Smith, Dan Purcell

Dan Purcell, founder and CEO of Ceartas, recalls being devastated to discover that his ex-partner had uploaded private and intimate videos to a porn site without their knowledge.

During the phone call, Purcell told me: Four or five years later, they all leaked out onto the internet and I finally found it. My then-girlfriend slid her phone to me across the counter with the video on. It was pretty bad. ”

Purcell then looked at services to help remove videos, but most of them were aimed at large companies rather than creators. “There was really nothing to help individuals,” he recalls.

Determined to come up with a solution to prevent such violations, Purcell hired co-founder Johnny Smith (now the startup's CTO) to build Ceartas in 2021. The startup, which applies AI to power its brand protection and content anti-piracy services, has raised a seed round from Earlybird Venture Capital and Upside VC, a fund founded by YouTube influencer group Sidemen. It has raised $4.5 million.

Ceartas claims it can automate the delisting process and quickly identify deepfakes. The company's product leverages a proprietary AI platform to scan digital platforms and identify fraudulent content, including deepfakes. It then de-indexes the content and automatically issues legal DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) takedown notices for pirated content. The platform claims that its system significantly reduces the visibility of problematic content on Google by 98%.

Purcell added that while Ceartas is currently targeting YouTubers and Instagram users, the company plans to adjust its service to account for physical goods such as counterfeit goods as it moves into the enterprise space. . “We used content creators to build that model, so we essentially built the dataset,” he added.

The company, which is based in Dublin and Berlin, plans to open an office in Los Angeles and has partnerships with platforms such as OnlyFans and Fanfix, a content monetization platform for creators. In addition to working with influencers like Sidemen, Ceartas also partners with physical product brands who put their content on social media.

Ceartas has four main competitors in this space. Rulta also offers his DMCA removal services to creators on platforms like Twitch, OnlyFans, X, Patreon, and BranditScan. In the field of B2B brand protection, Barcelona-based Red Point raised $106.6 million, and Bobile, a provider of services for large film and TV content companies, raised $181.6 million.

All companies that file DMCA notices, especially Google, are publicly identified and given a score based on the accuracy of the takedowns they facilitate. This information is part of a public repository called the Google Transparency Report and Lumen database.

On Google Web (image removal is not scored), Ceartas is rated to delist approximately 90% to 100% of the URLs it works on. Google's transparency index ranks Rulta at 63%, BranditScan at 54%, Red Points at 31%, and Vobile at 42%.

These numbers suggest that AI-driven approaches are likely to overtake older delisting methods in the near future.

Purcell said: “We basically built our own dataset using machine learning. The AI ​​recognizes the situation. The AI ​​goes to look at that page. Using optical character recognition, etc. , watermarks and facial recognition, and whether people are leaving derogatory or sexual comments. If it's more than 90%, we'll automatically send you a legal notice. The legal notices are manually reviewed by a copyright expert. We work with a Los Angeles law firm called Morrison Cooper.

He added that the company has a provisional patent on the AI ​​model because it does not rely on third-party technology.

Purcell said the startup chose to work with Early Bird because the venture capital firm was actively looking to help companies in the brand protection space. “We didn't really go and market to them; they actually found us,” he told me. “They've been researching this since 2019, but couldn't find anyone who could scale it and monetize it. So when we threw it at them, they threw it back at us. I did.”

Andre Retterath, partner at Earlybird, said in a statement: “Across the media and entertainment industry, individuals and businesses alike are facing unprecedented copyright infringement challenges. It also opened the floodgates for distribution.”

Recent funding rounds include Thomas Hesse (former president of Sony Music), Andrei Henkler (10x founder), Michele Attisani and Niccolo Maisto (Faceit), and Ryan Morrison (Evolved Talent/Morrison). It has also received support from new angel investors such as Cooper. Other participants come from the gaming, content creation, music, and television fields.