One of the early backers of TransferWise, the London-listed currency exchange app, is investing in an artificial intelligence start-up that aims to give rights holders more control over how their work is used.
Sky News understands that Human Native AI will announce this week that it has secured around £3 million from investors led by LocalGlobe and Mercuri.
The new funding will be used to help the London-based company, which launched in April, develop its workforce and marketing capabilities.
It was founded by James Smith and Jack Galilee.
Human Native AI, which has already signed clients including Mumsnet and Reach, publisher of The Daily Mirror, operates a marketplace where rights holders can make their licensed data available for AI developers to use in model training.
After registering on the platform, data subjects can choose who uses their data and for what purposes.
The launch of Human Native AI comes amid growing controversy over AI companies’ use of content to train systems like large language models – a growing challenge as generative AI evolves at a breakneck pace.
The existing landscape consists of a patchwork of legal battles, individual partnerships and protracted opt-out legal processes that are complicated and difficult to achieve.
“High-quality data is critical to progress in AI, so we need to make it easier for AI developers to acquire it fairly and responsibly,” said Smith.
“We created Human Native AI to help scale time-consuming licensing negotiations that are currently done on a case-by-case basis, and give more control and fair compensation to rights holders.”
The funding round is expected to be publicly disclosed on Tuesday.
“Companies developing AI products need access to high-quality data for model training,” said Ziv Reichert, partner at LocalGlobe.
“Individual case-by-case licensing arrangements are not practical, and the collection and subsequent cleansing of data is not sustainable.
“The Human Native AI 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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