Marty Pesis — who sold Vouch, a creative hiring platform, to YouTuber MrBeast earlier this year — launched Troveo, a platform that helps content owners, including creators, filmmakers, production companies and others, “get their license the content to AI companies while retaining property rights,” with $4.5 million in seed funding.

The launch comes with financial backing from an early-stage venture capital firm Seven Seven Sixfounded in 2020 by Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian and angel investors incl Zynga founder Mark Pincus, Siqi Chen and Andreas Klinger.

Troveo also said it “has entered into agreements with prominent AI companies to pay more than $5 million to content owners and digital rights managers by the end of the year.”

Troveo co-founder Trent Krupp, who previously worked for Impact, the LinkedIn founded by Ron Howard and Brian Grazer for Hollywood team workers, is the company’s chief revenue officer.

Troveo highlighted its positioning in the rapidly emerging AI space this way: “Lawmakers are years behind in understanding and regulating the industry, resulting in a lawless system where AI companies can mine data from the Internet without compensation to the owner of right of these data. Content owners are among the industries most affected by this, as they can spend more than $1 million on a video without any compensation from AI companies.”

Troveo founder and CEO Pesis said: “AI companies have been seen as adversaries of the creative industry, but we believe there is a better way forward. We enable creators to work side-by-side with AI companies in a way that ensures they are fairly compensated for their contributions.”

The company’s platform allows firms to upload their content and then get licensing deals and revenue from AI companies “interested in training their data,” that is, using the data to train their machine learning models, its approach outlined. “Troveo always puts content owners first, allowing them to retain full ownership rights and the ability to license their content an unlimited number of times.”

Ohanian said, “There is significant traction in the data training space. Ads are looking for multiple revenue streams and AI companies are looking for quality data.”

Pesis’ first company SociaLink, which he sold in 2017, helped celebrities build audiences and launch products. In 2018, he joined the celebrity video greeting service Cameo. Most recently, Pesis founded Vouch and sold it to MrBeast.