Yakoa, an NFT fraud detection startup, has raised $4.8 million to develop solutions to combat intellectual property crimes on Web3. According to Yakoa co-founder Andrew Dworschak, one of the most frequent types of fraud the company encounters is people making NFTs out of copyrighted artworks without permission.
Yakoa offers tools and an indexer that can spot duplicates or possible copyright violations in an NFT. The violations can range from direct forgery to stylistic forgery. The company will then notify platforms, businesses or artists regarding these illegal behaviors.
The startup has detected many instances of copyright violations in NFTs on many blockchains, including Ethereum, Solana, Avalanche, and others.
What matters is that it’s publicly verifiable
Andrew Dworschak
“In terms of blockchains, having every blockchain is on our road map,” Dworschak said. “The belief we have is it doesn’t matter where you mint IP or publish an address, what matters is that it’s publicly verifiable.”
Collab+Currency, Volt Capital and Brevan Howard Digital led the funding round. Yakoa co-founder Graham Robinson said the funds would be used to develop the company’s internal machine learning and data engineering teams.
Dworschak believes it’s difficult to prevent intellectual property crimes in Web3 because many assets can be involved.
“When we’re doing an attribution search, we’re trying to figure out where an asset might be derived from and give as much information as we can,” Dworschak said.
“Two assets can be similar and not fraudulent and that’s completely appropriate. There’s a lot of edge cases we need to be aware of and other ones that pop up in a similar vein and some use cases we take on as a platform and give people the chance to record their opinion.”
The name Yakoa is an anadrome of the phrase “A-OKAY.” According to Dworschak, they chose the name to ensure that everything is “A-OKAY” on Web3.
“The entire ecosystem is open and we want to continue to make sure it stays that way,” Robinson said. “We’re trying to create the tools for the industry to use and they can use it in their environment.”
