Camp Network Raises $25M to Make AI Pay for Content

The training data behind artificial intelligence models is under a lot of ethical scrutiny. With lawsuits from authors, media houses, and artists piling up, the once-unregulated AI rush is hitting a wall which is copyright. Creators have little visibility into how their work is used, and developers lack a structured way to access licensed, rights-cleared content.Camp Network, a crypto startup that has developed a blockchain protocol for registering, licensing, and monetizing digital content and on Tuesday, it announced a $25 million Series A funding round to expand that mission. 

The round was led by venture capital firms 1kx and Blockchain Capital, with participation from OKX, Lattice, Paper Ventures, dao5, TrueBridge, Maven 11, Hypersphere, Protagonist, and others. It was structured as an equity round with an attached token warrant which was a promise of a future cryptocurrency issuance and values the company at a token valuation of up to $400 million, according to Nirav Murthy, cofounder and co-CEO of Camp Network.

The company has now raised a total of $30 million, including a $1 million pre-seed and $4 million seed round in 2024.

Camp Network’s pitch is straightforward: as AI companies scramble for legally usable training data, content creators lack the infrastructure to assert ownership, license their work, and receive payment. Camp is building a Layer 1 blockchain that allows users to register intellectual property such as music, writing, and visual art, define usage rights via smart contracts, and receive automated royalties when the data is used by AI agents.

“At its core, Camp Network exists to solve the missing link between IP and AI,” said James Chi, Camp’s cofounder. “In a world where AI will generate the majority of content, provenance is no longer a feature, it’s the necessary foundation for making ownership and value enforceable by design.”

The startup’s focus on creator-driven infrastructure contrasts with some other players in the space. While companies like PIP Labs which raised $80 million in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto division have concentrated on striking licensing deals with large corporations, Camp Network has instead targeted creators in the crypto ecosystem.

“We made a conscious decision to go through the web3 route,” said Murthy.

The company’s architecture supports gasless IP registration and royalty distribution and allows developers to launch dedicated app chains with isolated blockspace and compute enabling the flexibility needed for agent-based AI workflows and high-performance media use cases. Its foundational technology, called the Proof of Provenance protocol, anchors ownership and licensing directly at the protocol layer. This mechanism supports traceable origin, attribution, and monetization of digital works, while also allowing for derivative creation.

According to Murthy, the need for such infrastructure is intensifying. AI companies which were once able to scrape vast datasets from the open internet without consequence, now face lawsuits and licensing demands. OpenAI, for example, has faced multiple legal challenges over its training practices and has recently started paying for access to proprietary content, including a deal with Reddit.

“If you’re a startup trying to train a voice model or a video model or a gaming model, you can’t do it anymore,” Murthy said. “Where is somewhere where I can verify that I won’t get sued?”

Camp’s approach is to make that verification and enforcement process automatic and enforceable. Creators upload their content on-chain with clearly defined licensing terms, and developers who wish to use that data must accept those terms before access. Royalties are embedded into smart contracts and paid out automatically when the content is used by an AI agent.

“Model architecture is converging, and compute is cornered — the real frontier is training data,” said Rahul Doraiswami, Camp Network’s CTO and third cofounder. “By anchoring provenance at the protocol layer, Camp turns user-owned IP into structured, rewardable training data. This aligns incentives between users and agents, creating a compounding system where every contribution strengthens the network’s intelligence.”

The founders, Murthy, Chi, and Doraiswami have all graduated from UC Berkeley. Murthy worked as a deal scout for CRV in college and later joined The Raine Group, which has invested in media ventures like Vice. Chi is a former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, while Doraiswami previously worked as a software engineer at CoinList.

Camp currently employs 18 people and plans to launch its cryptocurrency later in 2025.

The team sees its work as infrastructure for the next phase of the internet, where creators expect attribution and compensation when their content is used to train AI models. That vision is shared by early adopters like RewardedTV, a media platform that is already using Camp Network to register IP, license content to developers, and structure capital formation around AI-driven experiences.

“Camp Network’s infrastructure is enabling models of participation and monetization that didn’t exist before,” said Michael Jelen, CEO of RewardedTV. “From training agents on high-quality media to enabling collaborative ownership through onchain attribution, Camp Network is powering the next generation of media applications.”

Peter Pan, partner at 1kx, believes Camp Network is uniquely positioned in the current ecosystem. “The team behind Camp Network has a compelling opportunity to build the onchain equivalent of Hollywood is pioneering a new category of mass-market entertainment applications in crypto,” he said.

Aleks Larsen, General Partner at Blockchain Capital, sees broader potential. “Camp Network is building foundational infrastructure for the internet’s next chapter where IP and AI are core primitives,” Larsen said. “As more content is created by or with AI, Camp Network ensures provenance, ownership, and compensation are embedded in the system from the start.”

As AI systems continue to evolve and regulatory scrutiny increases, Camp Network is betting that transparency, traceability, and enforceability baked directly into protocol design, will be critical for both creators and developers. The startup aims to become the largest repository of user-owned IP and the leading marketplace for rights-cleared training data.

“Provenance isn’t optional anymore — it’s the system,” said Chi.