Bria, a generative artificial intelligence startup platform for developers that uses only licensed data, today announced that it has raised $40 million in early funding to scale up its technology for helping enterprise customers create on-brand images.

Red Dot Capital led the Series B funding round with participation from Major Investment, Entrée Capital, GFT Ventures, Intel Capital and In-Venture, which brings the total capital raised by Bria to $65 million.

Since text-to-image generative AI models began to wow users with the ability to create vivid pictures of cats and people based on natural language prompts, one major issue has been that AI must be trained on existing artwork. A problem comes when AI developers and companies scrape the internet for content, often without regard for the copyright ownership or original authorship of the images used to train the AI model.

Training an AI model on copyrighted sources taints its outputs with the potential of producing content that might use a source that could belong to an unwilling creator.

“Since its inception, Bria’s mission has been to bridge the accountability gap between organizations and gen AI through transparency, accessibility and control,” said founder and Chief Executive Dr. Yair Adato. “While our patented attribution technology has instilled trust in AI systems, facilitating responsible, controlled access to coveted IP content will change the game.”

Bria said it exclusively trains its generative AI models exclusively on licensed data. This is possible because every piece of content that goes into the training of its model is attributed to a source that can be mapped to the output of any generation. According to the company, this allows data owners to be programmatically compensated anytime their images are used in relation to the overall influence of their data on the output.

To make this happen, Bria has brought on more than 30 data partners, including Getty Images, Envato, Alamy, Freepix and Depositphoto. Together, the startup and its partners ensure that the training data is fully licensed and attributed so that no copyright infringement occurs during the training process and rights holders are kept in the loop.

Adato said that he intends to broaden the attribution engine to cover even more types of content, including music, video and text, to provide AI with a more transparent and sustainable economy for developers and creators.

Bria’s platform provides source-available models to developers and powerful application programming interfaces to interface them with their applications. Developers can also integrate with AWS SageMaker, Azure AI Foundry, AI marketplaces, Comfy UI and use plug-ins for Adobe Photoshop and Figma.

“Bria is redefining how enterprises create and personalize visual content at scale with its enterprise-grade platform, designed for control, predictability, and modularity,” said Danielle Ardon Baratz of Red Dot Capital. “Bria is setting a new standard in AI-driven content generation.”

Image: Bria