Human Native AI announces £2.8M Seed funding to build a fair AI data marketplace

• Today we’re announcing Human Native AI has raised £2.8M in Seed funding, led by LocalGlobe and Mercuri.
• Human Native AI is a data marketplace providing AI developers with easy access to fully licensed, ready-to-use data.
• We are solving a previously intractable problem - how to equip AI developers with the high quality, wide-ranging data needed to train powerful systems like Large Language Models, while ensuring rights holders are fairly paid for use of their work.

Who we are

At Human Native AI, we’re building an AI data marketplace that fairly benefits both rights holders and AI developers. Why? Because we believe creators and rights holders deserve fair compensation for their work, and AI developers need access to high quality data. We want to make it easy for anyone developing AI models to responsibly acquire fully licensed, ready-to-use data, and accelerate AI’s enablement and adoption. 

The problem we’re solving

AI models have the potential to bring vast benefits across industries, boosting our productivity and creativity. But effective and reliable models rely on high quality data - much of which comes from expert, copyrighted content. As a result:

• Developers face growing legal threats and regulatory pressure, enterprise hesitation around adoption of their tools, and a significant investment of time in cleaning and preparing data sets.
• Rights holders don’t have an easy way to index, benchmark, or evaluate their data-sets to demonstrate their quality and value, even as they’re seeking to take part in the AI industry. 
• The current level of choice and control over how rights holders’ data is used means they need to strike a bespoke deal with each AI developer, but doing so at scale is time consuming for both parties, and means they’re inadequately compensated for their work. 

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How we’re solving this problem 

Human Native AI solves these problems. By providing a catalogue of prepared, licensed content, we help AI developers responsibly acquire the high-quality data they need. They can purchase access to works for training, enter into revenue sharing agreements, or explore subscriptions with different publishers and per-use APIs for retrieval-augmented generation. 

We help rights holders get a fair deal for their content and provide full visibility over who is using it. We help get their data ready for AI models – indexing, benchmarking, and evaluating data-sets to demonstrate their quality and value. We give them granular control over what use cases their work is licensed for and at what price. We’re also developing monitoring tools so we can guard against copyright infringement in AI systems. 

We’re incredibly grateful to the investors who share our vision. 

• “Rights holders are demanding greater control over how their works are being used to train AI systems,” said Alan Hudson, Founding General Partner at Mercuri. “We think Human Native AI is the answer to this problem, preserving human creativity in the face of rapid technological developments.”
• “Companies building AI products need access to high quality data for model training and Retrieval Augmented Generation,” said Ziv Reichert, Partner at LocalGlobe. “Individual, case by case licensing agreements are not practical, and the scraping and subsequent cleaning of data is not sustainable. Human Native AI’s marketplace provides a rich data environment for AI developers while protecting intellectual property rights, and ensuring fair competition and participation in the AI industry.”

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What this announcement means 

We’ll use this £2.8M investment to further build our team as we develop our product and partnerships. This is just the beginning - in the coming weeks we’ll be announcing partnerships as we accelerate towards a future of AI systems built on the fair use of data. 

If you’re an AI developer or rights holder, sign up for access to our limited access beta here: https://www.humannative.ai/sign-up