AI Startup ProRata Partners With U.K. Publishers As Valuation Reportedly Hits $130M

ProRata, an AI startup that promises to pay publishers for the use of their work, has announced that several prominent British media organizations have been added to its growing list of partnerships.

The Los Angeles-based startup said Wednesday that it had reached licensing agreements with publishers including the Guardian, Sky News and DMG Media, publisher of the Daily Mail.

DMG Media has also committed to making a “significant investment” in ProRata as part of a funding round that values the startup at about $130 million, according to a report in the Financial Times, which cited people familiar with the situation. No other figures from the deal were disclosed.

ProRata recently raised $25 million in a Series A funding round from investors that included the likes of Revolution Ventures, Prime Movers Lab, and the Mayfield Fund.

“ProRata’s founder and CEO Bill Gross said his firm’s AI technology is the only one that pledges to credit and compensate creators, while providing users with accurate search results.

“We have had hundreds of content owners and media companies reach out to us from around the world who are interested in piloting our technology. Stealing and scraping content is not a sustainable path forward,” he added.

Earlier, ProRata had established similar partnerships with the Atlantic, Fortune, Time, Universal Music Group (UMG) and German publisher Axel Springer.

ProRata proposition to media companies is to pay them fairly for the usage of their content. The startup’s proprietary technology can assess the value of the content used to generate an AI platform’s responses and then calculate the appropriate amount of compensation. This would allow copyright holders to be paid for their content on a per-use basis.

Gross had earlier said that AI platforms have been relying on “shoplifted, plagiarized content,” which creates an environment where “creators get nothing, and disinformation thrives.”

Gross is credited with inventing the pay-per-click monetization model for online searches with his company, GoTo.com, which was later sold to Yahoo! in 2003.

“Bill Gross is a battle-tested serial entrepreneur who is deeply familiar with monetization models,” Tige Savage, a cofounder of Revolution, wrote recently in a blog post.

“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,” Savage added

Media companies and other content creators have been filing lawsuits against OpenAI and various tech companies over the uncompensated use of copyrighted materials in training their AI systems.

The New York Times sued OpenAI for copyright infringement in December. News Corp, the parent company of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, filed a copyright and trademark infringement lawsuit against AI search engine Perplexity in October.