An early backer of TransferWise, the London-listed foreign exchange app, is investing in an artificial intelligence start-up which aims to give rights-holders more control over how their work is used.

Sky News understands Human Native AI will announce this week it has secured close to £3m from investors led by LocalGlobe and Mercuri.

The new funding will be used to help the London-based company, which was launched in April, build its workforce and marketing capability.

It was founded by James Smith and Jack Galilee.

Human Native AI, which has already signed up customers including Mumsnet and Reach, the publisher of The Daily Mirror, operates a marketplace where rights-holders can make their licensed data available for AI developers to use for model training.

After signing up to the platform, data-owners can choose who uses it and for what purposes.

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Human Native AI’s launch comes amid growing controversy over the use of content by AI companies to train systems such as Large Language Models – a growing challenge as generative AI evolves at breakneck pace.

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The existing landscape consists of a patchwork of legal battles, individual partnerships and protracted opt-out legal processes which are cumbersome and hard to deliver.

“High-quality data is fundamental to progress in AI, so we need to make it easier for AI developers to fairly and responsibly acquire it,” Mr Smith said.

“We created Human Native AI to help scale time-intensive licensing negotiations that are currently done on a case-by-case basis, and give more control and fair compensation to rights-holders.”

The funding round is expected to be unveiled publicly on Tuesday.

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“Companies building AI products need access to high quality data for model training,” said Ziv Reichert, a partner at LocalGlobe.

“Individual case-by-case licensing agreements are not practical, and the scraping and subsequent cleaning of data is not sustainable.

“Human Native AI’s marketplace provides a rich data environment for AI developers while protecting intellectual property rights, and ensuring fair competition and participation in the AI industry.”

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