Revolution Ventures Invests in ProRata.ai, the Pioneering Attribution Solution for Content Owners in the Age of AI
The startup’s $25 Series A will be used to grow its credit and compensation platform, which has gained early support from major media companies and news publishers.
Meet ProRata.ai — the company led by serial entrepreneur Bill Gross that’s on a mission to fix the AI economy’s greatest fault. ProRata aligns interests between generative AI companies and the creators of the content that enable them. The company’s technology facilitates fair credit and compensation to content creators and provides an economic model that expands the market, simultaneously making AI-generated responses more reliable for consumers. The result: Everyone wins. I have known and worked with Bill for nearly 15 years, and ProRata is his biggest idea yet. I’m pleased to join him on ProRata’s board, along with Mike Lang.
What They’re Solving For: Since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, Generative AI has rapidly transformed the search and content consumption landscape. This shift has sparked a heated debate on fair use, attribution, and monetization for creators whose content fuels LLMs. Growing challenges for publishers and consumers include:
- A search environment that diverts consumers away from original content and toward AI-generated responses, thus hindering creators’ reach, profitability, and sustainability.
- An unfair (and more often, non-existent) attribution system where AI-generated responses fail to credit creators, and the platforms driving them fail to compensate content owners.
- The indiscriminate processing of information, leading to the ingestion of content from unreliable, unverified sources, resulting in misinformation and AI hallucinations.
What They Do: ProRata enables the long-term success of the generative AI industry. Just as we witnessed with the evolution of music, where the model of stealing content (Napster) ultimately gave way to the model of growing the market and sharing revenue (Spotify), generative AI will inevitably undergo such a transformation. In the case of AI, this requires technology that allows attribution of source content and a business model that rewards it. ProRata does both, while also protecting consumers against false answers and AI hallucinations driven by unreliable underlying content. In founder and CEO Bill Gross’s words, ProRata is “pro-author, pro-artist, and pro-consumer.”
How They Do It: ProRata enables copyright holders to share in the financial benefits of their content usage, similar to music and video streaming. However, unlike streaming, generative AI requires fractional attribution, as LLMs generate responses using multiple content sources to varying degrees. ProRata’s technology analyzes AI output, measures the value of contributing content, and calculates proportional compensation using a proprietary algorithm that determines attribution. The company’s name reflects its model, which shares 50% of revenues with creators on a pro-rata, per-use basis.
Traction To-Date: ProRata has secured partnerships with major media groups and creators, leading to a broader attribution and monetization movement across the entire AI industry. Axel Springer, Fortune, Financial Times, The Atlantic, Time, Universal Music Group, and others have signed on to share subscription revenue on a per-user basis. Since the platform’s public launch, the team has seen a surge of interest from additional global news publishers, media and entertainment companies, and renowned authors.
Why We Like It: ProRata is on the right side of transformative trends, is uniquely addressing a huge problem, and is doing it in a fair way that advances the AI ecosystem for everyone. The team is uniquely qualified to lead the generative AI attribution movement. Bill Gross is a battle-tested serial entrepreneur who is deeply familiar with monetization models, having pioneered the pay-per-click system that underlies Internet search today. He’s attracted a world-class tech team led by AI luminary Tarek Najm to implement the vision and an accomplished business team, including Annelies Jansen and Jonas Lee to drive content and AI partnerships.
Where They’re Headed: ProRata will use funds to build out its team of tech and media experts, form and expand partnerships with distinguished content owners, including publishers, authors, music labels, poets, and artists, and launch its consumer AI answer engine, which will showcase the company’s attribution technology, this fall.
We’re excited to partner with ProRata as it scales its platform and plays a pivotal role in defining AI monetization. To learn more about the company, visit prorata.ai.
