SY Lee: A Korean startup creator who fetched $80 mn for Story Protocol

Seung Yoon Lee, a South Korean startup creator, was in his early 20s when he co-founded Radish Fiction Inc., a US-based mobile fiction platform, in 2016.

Now in his early 30s – still regarded as young in Korea’s Confucian society – SY Lee is arguably a legend in the startup community as he bulked up the value of another firm he co-founded, Story Protocol, to $2.25 billion in just a couple of years.

On Wednesday, Palo Alto-based startup Programmable IP Labs (PIP Labs), the initial core contributor behind Story Protocol, raised $80 million in a Series B round with the startup’s valuation estimated at $2.25 billion.

The Series B, led by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, has brought the total raised by PIP Labs to $140 million.

Other investors participating in the latest round included cryptocurrency investor Polychain Capital, Stability AI Ltd. Vice President Scott Trowbridge, K11 Founder Adrian Cheng, digital art collector Cozomo de’ Medici, Hashed, and Brevan Howard, a European hedge fund founded by British billionaire Alan Howard.

Investors from Korea included Samsung Next, an overseas investment arm of Samsung Electronics Co., and Bang Si-hyuk, founder of HYBE Co., the label behind boy band sensation BTS.

BLOCKCHAIN TO PROTECT CREATORS FROM IP THEFT

With the rise of artificial intelligence, intellectual property (IP) has become ever more valuable, as it now serves as the foundational input for large language models and image-generating AI models.

Story Protocol uses blockchain to provide attribution for IP rights as well as creative rights licensing such as copyrights for creators and IP owners.

Blockchain technology has long been used to attribute ownership to intangibles including images and video game assets.

"Without great original IP, the AI models don’t develop," Lee, co-founder and chief executive of PIP Labs, said in a media interview. “AI is taking, stealing data without consent and benefiting from it without sharing the rewards with the original creators.”

According to PIP Labs, Story Protocol’s blockchain allows creators to declare sovereignty over their IPs through tokenization.

This means they can formally register their IPs on the blockchain, establishing ownership and setting specific rules for how their IPs can be used, shared or modified. It’s a way for creators to protect their work and maintain control over how it is used. 

“The current state of AI destroys the incentive to create original IP,” he said. “This surely will be negative for AI if no one has an incentive to create something original for AI to train upon. It's inadvertently suicide (for creative content) in the long run.”

STORY PROTOCOL AFTER RADISH

Lee, a Korean graduate of Oxford University, co-founded PIP Labs in June 2022, together with Jason Zhao from Google Inc.'s AI affiliate, Google DeepMind Technologies Ltd.

Zhao is now co-founder and chief product officer at PIP Labs.

Before PIP Labs, Lee established Radish in 2016. Five years later, he sold the mobile fiction platform to Kakao Entertainment Corp., the web novels and comics platform operator of tech giant Kakao Corp. for 500 billion won.

After the sale of Radish to Kakao, Lee briefly worked at Kakao Entertainment as its global strategy officer (GSO) before launching the intellectual property-focused blockchain Story Protocol.

Write to Eun-Yi Ko at koko@hankyung.com

In-Soo Nam edited this article.