Story and OKX Ventures Announce $10M Startup Fund

Story

24 June 2025

Backing Teams at the Intersection of IP and AI

This week, Story and OKX Ventures announced a $10M fund to back early-stage teams building at the intersection of intellectual property (IP) and AI. The goal is to support the founders who are turning IP into the world’s most important financial primitive.

In the age of AI, IP isn’t just a legal category. It’s an asset class, a programmable, on-chain primitive that powers the models of tomorrow and desperately needs new financial rails.

Apply here

IP: The Most Valuable, Underutilized Asset Class on Earth

IP is the research behind mRNA vaccines, the voice of Morgan Freeman, the characters in your favorite game, the data behind climate models, and the code powering LLMs. It’s also your posts, your voice memos, and your likeness. Together, IP accounts for over $61 trillion in global value.

However, unlike real estate or commodities, IP doesn’t have an institutional financial system around it. There’s no way to collateralize, fractionalize, or trade it easily. Licensing happens through PDFs and lawyers. Revenue is split through spreadsheets and settlements. And enforcement is prohibitively expensive for most. In short: IP is valuable, but financially inaccessible.

AI Changed the Game, But IP Wasn’t Ready

Generative AI has created a new industrial demand for IP. Model developers need massive volumes of high-quality, specialized data to stay competitive, from medical imaging to multilingual poetry, voice libraries, technical documentation, film scripts, song catalogs, and patent databases. Every model advancement depends on fresh, licensed content.

But the systems to supply that IP are broken. Today, that demand is being met through scraping, lawsuits, and backroom licensing deals. There is no scalable, programmable licensing layer, structured financial marketplace, or native asset standard. Most IP holders are left uncompensated while their work trains billion-dollar AI systems.

IP as a Real-World Asset (RWA)

Story treats IP as what it truly is: a real-world asset class. Like real estate or T-bills, IP has cash flows. It has long-term value, and it is legally enforceable. It can be priced, collateralized, and transacted on-chain.

But unlike those other asset classes, IP is programmable. That makes it more dynamic than physical assets. You can embed licensing terms, revenue splits, remix permissions, AI training consent, all as parameters written into smart contracts. Programmability is what makes IP the most exciting RWA of the next decade.

Why We Launched This Fund

The $10M Story-OKX Ventures fund bets on the primitives that help realize IP as the next great real-world asset class. We’re backing founders who see IP as an on-chain financial opportunity and are designing the infrastructure, apps, and markets to support it.

What We’re Funding

1. IP RWA Protocols
Infrastructure for tokenizing IP rights, packaging royalty streams into tradable assets, and building compliant frameworks for IPFi (IP Finance).

2. Licensing Engines for AI
Tooling to license and deliver specialized datasets for model training with provenance, compensation, and usage terms embedded.

3. Cultural IP Markets
Tokenized revenue streams tied to games, films, books, or character IP, enabling new forms of access and fan investment.

4. Attribution-Led Distribution
Protocols that track, attribute, and monetize derivative works, turning remixing into a source of yield for original IP holders.

What’s Next

We’re not just funding IP startups. We’re helping define a new asset class and the rails it runs on. If you’re building at the edge of IP, AI, and finance, reach out to us.

This fund is open-ended, actively managed, and designed to move quickly. If selected, you’ll get capital, access to Story infrastructure, distribution support, and long-term alignment with one of the most essential categories of the next cycle.

Apply here