Optic

History

2022: Raising $11 million in investments

In mid-July 2022, the American NFT startup Optic attracted the first investment of $11 million from venture capital Kleiner Perkins and cryptocurrency investment giant Pantera Capital. Other investors include Lattice Capital, OpenSea, CoinDCX, Neon DAO and Flamingo DAO. The company will spend money on infrastructure development and a multiple increase in the number of developers.

NFT startup of founders from Russia Optic uses AI to determine the originality of NFT. To do this, the service processes millions of tokens daily and compares them with existing collections. The start-up then issues a percentage result that shows how much the token complies with the created rules. The service looks for visual similarities, including inverted images, color changes, minor distortions or fuzziness. The monitoring tool informs marketplaces, brands or media companies of potential intellectual property violations.

Optic will use the funds to create expensive infrastructure and hire talented engineers, Andrei Doronichev, co-founder and CEO of Optic, told CoinDesk. Doronichev explained that while NFTs are technically unique due to their chain address, their surface-level appearance to the human eye may be indistinguishable from counterfeiting. A rate below 95% means the NFT likely includes inspired or derived art, Doronichev said, due to the fact that a higher percentage number means the closest match and the most likely case of outright counterfeiting.

Andrey Doronichev previously worked as product director at Google and led the YouTube Mobile team at a time when the video platform was creating its ContentID system to combat counterfeiting. Founded in March 2022 in San Francisco, Optic was co-founded by Doronichev along with AI researchers Roman Doronin and Vlad Vinogradov, who founded Eora Data Lab, an AI studio that carried out projects for companies such as PepsiCo and Yandex.

Optic's roadmap for the near future includes plans for a public application programming interface (API) for Web3 developers and new tools for NFT creators and collectors.^[1]

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