Blockchain company Mediachain receives $1.5 million in seed round led by A16z

Mediachain, a New York-based blockchain startup, has received funding from heavyweight VC firms Andreessen Horowitz and Union Square Ventures.

The two companies announced today that they have led a $1.5 million seed round in Mediachain, with participation from RRE Ventures, Digital Currency Group (DGC), and LDV Capital, as well as angel investors Alexis Ohanian, William Mougayar, Kanyi Maqubela, David Lee, Mathieu Drouin, and Brian Message.

The funding comes four months after Mediachain launched its core product, a metadata protocol that enables content creators to timestamp their work and place it on the bitcoin blockchain, using the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), a hypermedia protocol.

In an interview, Mediachain Labs co-founders Jesse Walden and Denis Nazarov expressed their enthusiasm for joining the VC portfolio, which has backed some of the biggest bets in the entire blockchain ecosystem, including Internet of Things startup 21 Inc and digital asset exchange Coinbase.

Nonetheless, the Mediachain founder sees this as a “positive pressure” that will encourage them.

Walden told CoinDesk:

“There’s a lot of collaboration across the community. We’re all helping each other, so for us to be included in this portfolio is a boon and inspires us to learn more.”

The investment also signals an emerging investment strategy for Andreessen Horowitz and Union Square Ventures. For example, in June last year, both firms backed OB1, the development team behind decentralized e-commerce platform OpenBazaar.

While OpenBazaar bears many similarities to the defunct dark web marketplace Silk Road, the investment is proving to be a savvy move. Since its launch in April, OpenBazaar has gained significant traction, with more than 100,000 downloads as of mid-May.

Understanding What is Mediachain

So what exactly does Mediachain do? In the words of its founder, it aims to solve an "impossible problem" on the current Internet, that is, to help those who create digital media to link their identities to their works.

While one could argue that Mediachain is a tool designed to reduce “copyright infringement,” Nazarov and Walden didn’t explain it that way during the interview.

Instead, they envision Mediachain as:

“We created Mediachain not as a copyright registry, but more as a knowledge base that preserves information about creators and attribution,” Walden explained.

To facilitate this process, Mediachain prioritizes images from public organizations such as the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York and from for-profit image database Getty Images. However, they also emphasize that the platform is open source and can be used by anyone who wants to participate.

Today, Medichain has seven full-time employees, and Nazarov and Walden said the new funding will not have an impact on the size of the team.

Instead, Walden said the money will go toward developing the project, including the service and the app, which can then be used to encourage more users.

“In our upcoming Alpha version of the Mediachain network, we will be able to contribute some resources to build some applications and services,” he said. “More importantly, we are interested in building a community around the project.”

He concluded:

“We hope that one day, Mediachain can become a universal repository for all media ever created.”