As artificial intelligence companies face copyright pressure, marketplace Versos is offering tracked, rights-cleared video.
How the tech giants love it Cohere and OpenAI Faced with lawsuits over AI training methods that allegedly violate copyright laws, Versos AI is betting that companies want to buy training materials they know they are legally entitled to use.
The St. John's, New Jersey-based startup announced today that it closed a $1.85 million seed round on November 14 that will help create a marketplace for video training data, a marketplace it claims is a “world first” allowing customers to buy and sell rights-cleared footage for use in artificial intelligence models. The company says it turns simple video into AI-ready data, structured accordingly, and with the ability to track ownership and data transfer.
“The industry is recognizing a simple truth: AI needs video, and that video needs to be rights-cleared, structured and trackable,” Versos CEO Chris Quiville said in a statement.
“Tracking rights in the world of artificial intelligence is extremely important.”
Chris Keevill, Versos
The funding was facilitated through a simple future equity agreement (SAFE) led by Innovobot Resonance Ventures (IRV) as well as the New Brunswick Innovation Fund (NBIF). Charlottetown-based companies PEI-headquartered Island Capital Partners, Toronto-based RiSC Capital and the University of Waterloo's Velocity Fund also participated in the round. The startup previously raised $1.5 million through SAFE.
In an interview with BetaKit, Keewill highlighted the diversity of investors in Atlantic Canada and noted that they have no intention of leaving the region. “We are a proud maritime company,” he said.
Versos was founded in 2022 by Keevill and Cesar Grzelak, who is the company's chief scientific officer. As Keeville explained to BetaKit, the company was created as a response to early generative AI systems such as Midjourney. Although copyright was not a primary concern, Grzelak advanced the thesis that “opportunities” would arise from introducing intelligence into video.
Versos AI said it will use the funding to “accelerate” development, expand the studio's onboarding process and support the launch of its broader Video Intelligence platform. The system helps AI developers find, create and monitor rights-cleared videos.
Managing Partner of the IRV Foundation Neha Khera Versos' approach “fills a gap” in the industry, it said in a statement. “Versos is building critical infrastructure just as video-focused AI ‘world models’ are beginning to be adopted en masse,” she said.
The funding comes alongside breakthroughs in video-friendly large language models (LLMs). Google, for example, recently released Gemini 3 models that better interpret video data for reasoning, and the Veo 3.1 model provides more convincing video generation.
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However, copyright issues remain. Copyright holders love news publishers claim that major LLM creators often train on copyrighted material taken from the Internet without permission, prompting lawsuits. This, in turn, has caused some creators to avoid AI content due to fears that they could face legal action.
Versos AI is not alone in addressing the rights issue, although the methods vary. Toronto startup Moonvalley recently raised a new… US$84 million round for a video generator trained exclusively on licensed footage, allowing film and TV studios to safely incorporate AI video into their projects.
Keevill views his company as part of an ethical AI ecosystem rather than as a competitor. If Moonvalley is a buyer of video content, Versos AI is a supplier that helps video producers earn “passive income” from their content.
The co-founder also believes that copyright issues have now become permanent. It's now “very difficult” to train on publicly available data without running into problems, he said. He argues that creators will always have to worry about the provenance of their material, and that these concerns will only grow with the mountain of data.
“This will be with us forever,” Keeville told BetaKit. “Tracking rights in the world of artificial intelligence is extremely important.”
Image provided Unsplash. Photo by Jacob Owens.
