When he realized that a former partner had previously posted private, intimate videos of them on a porn site without his knowledge, tech founder Dan Purcell was devastated. He decided to find a solution to prevent such violations from happening again. His 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.
Ceartas DMCA was founded in 2021 by Purcell (CEO) and Jonny Smyth (CTO) to use AI for brand protection and anti-piracy services for content creators and brands.
This is done by de-indexing content and automatically issuing legal notices for pirated copies.
The company leverages its own proprietary AI platform and scans digital platforms to identify and remove unauthorized content, including deepfakes.
The platform claims to increase the visibility of problematic content on Google by 98%. It also claims to be able to take action against deepfakes.
The company, based in Dublin and Berlin, plans to open an office in Los Angeles and has now signed partnerships with platforms such as OnlyFans and Fanfix (a content monetization platform for YouTubers).
On a call, Purcell told me, “I was dating a girl in tech 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 find out,” he told me. “My girlfriend at the time pushed her phone with the videos on her phone across the counter towards me. It was pretty terrible.”
He looked for services that could help, but most were aimed at large companies rather than creatives.
“There wasn’t really anything to help individuals. So, as an engineer, I built something myself… A copyright notice is then sent in accordance with the DMCA. That’s how we started in 2020. A year later, the content creator economy was booming and the app took off.”
He told me that it is currently aimed at YouTubers and Instagramers, but “as we move forward, we will also offer the service to deal with physical goods such as counterfeit goods.” We have leveraged the content creators to to build this model, essentially a data set.”
“Our service is completely automated. It is powered by AI. And if we look at the Google Transparency reports that I think have been forwarded to you, you can see [other platforms] have a significantly lower overall success rate. This can put the content creator in a difficult legal situation as they can get into trouble by sending false DMCA notices.
He added that the company has a provisional patent for the model because it does not rely on third-party technologies.
Not only do they work with influencers like the Sidemen, but they also work with physical goods brands that post their content on social media.
The startup chose to work with Earlybird, Purcell said, because it was proactively looking for a company in this area of brand protection. : “We didn’t actually go out and pitch them, they actually found us. They had been researching this since 2019. And they couldn’t find anyone who could scale it and monetize it. So when we pitched them, they pitched us back. We really felt that these people understood the problem because they are very technical and data-oriented.
Andre Retterath, partner at Earlybird Venture Capital, added in a statement: “In the media and entertainment industries, individuals and companies alike are facing unprecedented challenges of piracy… Training modern AI large-scale language models (LLM) also opened the floodgates for the use and Distribution of unauthorized content.”
However, Ceartas is not the only player in this area. There are four main competitors in the brand protection space:
Rulta is a digital content protection and brand copyright infringement platform used by Twitch, OnlyFans, Twitter/X and Patreon, among others. BranditScan is another provider that offers similar services.
In the B2B brand protection space, Barcelona-based Red Points raised $106.6 million, while Vobile, which serves major film and TV content companies, raised $181.6 million.
All companies that submit DMCA notices, particularly to Google, are publicly identified and evaluated based on the accuracy of the takedown. This information is part of a public repository called the Google Transparency Report and also the Lumen database. On Google Web (image removal is not rated), Ceartas is listed as a company that achieves 90 to 100% of URL removals.
In Google’s Transparency Index, Rulta is at 63%, BranditScan at 54%, Red Points at 31% and Vobile at 42%.
These numbers suggest that the AI-driven approach is likely to replace older delisting methods in the near future.
Ceartas claims that it automates the delisting process and can quickly identify deepfakes.
Purcell said: “We essentially created our own data set using ML. The AI is aware of the context… The AI will look at the page. Things like optical character recognition are used to look at watermarks or facial recognition… when people leave derogatory or sexualized comments. If the value is above 90%, a legal notice will be sent automatically. If it is below 90%. It goes to a copyright specialist for manual review. The legal information is written by lawyers. We work with a law firm in LA called Morrison Cooper.”
The latest round of financing is also supported by new angels: Thomas Hesse (former president of Sony Music), Andrej Henkler (10x founder), Michele Attisani & Niccolo Maisto (Faceit) and Ryan Morrison (Evolved Talent/Morrisson Cooper), among others. from the areas of gaming, content creation, music and television.