Yakoa Raises $4.8M to Build NFT Fraud Detection Tool – NFTgators
Quick take:
- Yakoa has raised $4.8 million in a funding round led by Collab+Currency, Volt Capital and Brevan Howard Digital.
- The Web3 startup is building an NFT fraud detection tool that will protect creators’ intellectual properties from counterfeiting.
- Data Community Fund, Alliance DAO, Uniswap Labs, Orange DAO, Time Zero and Sunset Ventures also participated in the round.
Yakoa has completed a $4.8 million funding round led by Collab+Currency, Volt Capital and Brevan Howard Digital. The fundraiser also attracted participation from Data Community Fund, Alliance DAO, Uniswap Labs Ventures, Orange DAO, Time Zero Capital, gmjp, Sunset Ventures and FAST by GETTYLAB.
Yakoa is a web3 startup focused on building tools for NFT fraud detection. The company said it will use the funds to accelerate the development of tools that will help fight intellectual property (IP) fraud in web3.
The company’s NFT fraud detection tool identifies and tracks intellectual property rights violations on the chain, ranging from direct/partial copying to stylistic counterfeiting. After identifying a breach, Yakoa notifies brands, platforms and creators of the breach.
According to Andrew Dworschak, co-founder of Yakoa, one of the most common infringements occurs when people make copies of NFTs and claim to be their original work.
The company is now expanding the engineering teams behind the product as more blockchains integrate it into their ecosystems. Yakoa is already able to identify NFTs across multiple blockchains, including Ethereum, Solana, Avalanche, and Polygon, among others.
Dworschak told TechCrunch that the platform wants to cover all blockchains in the future. “The belief we have is that it doesn’t matter where you create the IP or publish an address, what matters is that it’s publicly verifiable,” he said.
Dworschak said it has become very easy for anyone to make money off people’s backs. The Yakoa founder highlighted simple forgery tactics such as changing color, cropping images and photoshopping as primary examples.
“When we do an attribution search, we try to find out where an asset might come from and provide as much information as we can,” Dworschak said. “Two assets can be similar and not fraudulent, and that’s totally appropriate. There are a lot of edge cases that we have to be aware of and others that come up in the same way, and some use cases we take on as a platform and give people the chance to register their opinion.”
NFT fraud is a high priority issue for creators, with leading platforms and marketplaces already deploying tools to try to protect their creative side of the community.
In May, NFT fraud detection platform Doppel raised $5 million in a round backed by Solana Ventures, Polygon Studios, OpenSea Ventures, Dapper Labs and others to accelerate development of its real-time, cross-chain monitoring service to detect NFT fraud and counterfeits.
In June, Tovera acquired NFT fraud prevention startup SnifflesNFT to bolster its fake NFT image detection service, while Chainalysis said in May it is expanding its crypto fraud detection service to cover NFTs after completing a $170 million fundraising.
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