Realizing that a former partner had unknowingly put their previously private, intimate videos on a porn site, tech founder Dan Purcell was devastated. He decided to find a solution to help prevent such violations from happening again. Ceartas’ startup has now raised $4.5 million in a Seed round from European VC Earlybird, as well as Upside VC, a fund founded by The Sidemen, the YouTube influencer group.
DMCA noticeswas founded in 2021 by Purcell (CEO) and Jonny Smyth (CTO), to apply artificial intelligence to brand protection and anti-piracy services for content creators and brands.
It does this by unblocking content and automatically issuing legal notices for pirated content.
Leveraging its own proprietary AI platform, the company scans digital platforms to detect and eliminate unauthorized content, including deepfakes.
The platform claims a 98% visibility of problematic content on Google. It also claims to be able to counter deepfakes.
Based in Dublin and Berlin, the company plans to open an office in Los Angeles and has now signed partnerships with platforms such as OnlyFans and Fanfix, (content monetization platform for creators),
In one call, Purcell told me, “I was on a date with a girl who was in the tech industry and she asked me if I wanted to do some personal videos with her. About four or five years later, they all ended up on the internet and I was the last one to know,” he told me. “My girlfriend at the time slid her phone onto the counter with the videos on the phone. It was pretty horrible.”
He looked at services that could help, but most were aimed at large businesses rather than creators.
“There was nothing out there to help people. So as an engineer, I built something myself… Then he will send a legal DMCA copyright notice. So that’s how it started in 2020. A year later, the creator economy was booming and the app took off.”
He told me that right now it’s aimed at YouTubers and Instagramers, but “as we move forward with the business, we’ll make it easier for the service to take care of physical goods like counterfeit goods. We used the content creators to build this model, essentially, build a dataset.”
“Our service is fully automated. Powered by AI. And when we look at Google’s transparency reports, which I believe were forwarded to you, you can see [other platforms] they have a much lower success rate overall. This can put the content creator in a difficult legal situation because you can get into trouble by sending the wrong DMCA notices.
He added that the company has a provisional patent on the model, as it does not rely on third-party technology.
In addition to working with influencers like Sidemen, they also work with physical goods brands that place their content on social media.
The startup chose to partner with Earlybird, Purcell said, because it was actively looking for a company in this brand protection space. : “We didn’t actually go out and pitch them, they actually found us.. They had been looking for it since 2019. And they couldn’t find anyone who could scale it to win it.. So when we pitched it to them, they gave it back to us . We really felt that these guys understood the problem because they are very technical and data-oriented.
Andre Retterath, Partner at Earlybird Venture Capital, added in a statement: “Across the media and entertainment industry, individuals and businesses are facing unprecedented piracy challenges… Training modern artificial intelligence models in large languages (LLM) has also opened up the portals for use and dissemination of unauthorized content.”
However, Ceartas is not the only player in this space. It has four main competitors in the brand protection space:
Rulta is a digital content and brand copyright protection platform used by Twitch, OnlyFans, Twitter/X, and Patreon, among others. BranditScan is another that offers similar services.
In the B2B brand protection space, Barcelona-based Red Points has raised $106.6 million, while Vobile, which serves large businesses in film and TV content, has raised $181.6 million.
All companies that file DMCA notices, especially Google, are publicly identified and rated for takedown accuracy. This information is part of a public repository called the Google Transparency Report, as well as the Lumen database. On the Google Web (they don’t score image removals), Ceartas is reported to achieve 90 to 100% of deleted URLs.
In Google transparency index, Rulta is at 63%BranditScan at 54%Red Points at 31%and Vobile at 42%.
These numbers suggest that the AI-based approach is likely to replace older erasure methods in the near future.
Ceartas’ claim is that it automates the delisting process and can quickly spot deepfakes.
Purcell said: “We essentially created our own dataset using ML. AI is contextually aware… AI will look at the page. It will use things like optical character recognition to look at watermarks, facial recognition… it’s people leaving disparaging comments or comments that are sexual. If it is over 90%, it will automatically send a legal notice. If it is below 90%. It goes to a copyright specialist for manual review….Legal notices are drafted by lawyers. We’re working with a law firm in Los Angeles called Morrison Cooper.”
The latest funding round also draws support from new angels: Thomas Hesse (former President of Sony Music), Andrej Henkler (10x Founders), Michele Attisani & Niccolo Maisto (Faceit) and Ryan Morrison (Evolved Talent/Morrisson Cooper), among others from the gaming, content creation, music and television sectors.
