Los Angeles-based Pex has secured a $57m investment round.
The round was joined by existing investors with additional participation from Tencent, Tencent Music Entertainment, the CueBall Group, NexGen Ventures Partners, Amaranthine, and others.
Originally founded in 2014, Pex’s technology monitors social networks worldwide – as well as platforms which rely on UGC content – to weed out music and film content that belongs to rightsholders.
Pex boasts that it can find “snippets as short as 1 second across dozens of platforms worldwide”.
Last year, the company acquired Dubset Media Holdings in a buyout worth $25m-plus.
Pex states that the new investment will help it to scale its Attribution Engine (AE), which the company describes as “the licensing infrastructure for a better Internet”.
According to a press statement: “AE creates a single marketplace for digital content, transforming how creators, rightsholders and platforms do business together by enabling fair compensation and increased access to copyrighted content”.
Pex claims that its AE technology can review over 10,000 hours of content per minute, find all uses of audio and video copyrights, attribute the copyrights to their full set of owners, and ensure that rights holders have licensed and cleared the copyright for use, all in less than five seconds.
“AE sets new standards in speed and scale and is the first platform capable of meeting today’s content growth and demands.”
Rasty Turek, Pex
“Attribution is vital to the Internet; it can help protect copyright without stifling creation,” says Pex founder and CEO Rasty Turek.
“AE sets new standards in speed and scale and is the first platform capable of meeting today’s content growth and demands.
“It replaces unreliable upload filters and takedown requests with real-time use authorization and licensing, benefiting creators while recognizing and compensating those whose works are sampled and shared.”
Added Turek: “My vision has always been to deliver a set of technologies that brought transparency, accuracy, and most importantly trust to digital rights and content.
“I feel Pex has now accomplished that and with this round of funding we are well positioned for what lies ahead.”
“If we could seamlessly compensate artists – if we could enable a culture of fair and universal attribution – then we could set the stage for a truly free and open Internet.”
Amadea Choplin, Pex
Pex COO Amadea Choplin, added: “We live in a world where everyone is creating, mixing and remixing copyrighted works.
“But the ability to rapidly identify, attribute, and license them in real-time is the missing link to address the value-gap. Instead of fearing regulations, or finding loopholes to make them toothless, what if we relied on a better infrastructure for today’s Internet?”
“If we could seamlessly compensate artists – if we could enable a culture of fair and universal attribution – then we could set the stage for a truly free and open Internet.”
“The solution to this puzzle lies not with litigation, legislation, or innovation alone, but with the combined strength of sound law, breakthrough technology, and durable social norms. In short, we need a leap forward in trust.”
At the time of Dubset acquisition last year, Pex had processed 6 billion hours of audio and video data to date – representing more than 20 billion videos and songs – which it had discovered/tracked across platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, VK, Vimeo, Twitch and Twitter.Music Business Worldwide
