Story, a blockchain project that once focused on intellectual property tokenization, is scrapping its old identity. It now operates as the DATA Foundation – an AI data infrastructure company with a direct pipeline to 1.1 billion user-consented data points.
The foundation is integrating Kled, a global marketplace that pays people in real time for their data. Kled launched two weeks ago and already has 200,000 contributors. The platform handles up to 4.5 million file uploads a day, mostly in robotics and physical AI. It raised $11 million from investors including Sebastian Thrun, who led Google's Waymo self-driving car project.
The move addresses a growing bottleneck. Frontier AI labs are running out of clean, legally safe web data. Indiscriminate scraping has exhausted large parts of the public internet, while copyright lawsuits pile up. The foundation says the industry needs infrastructure that can verify a dataset's origin and track its quality transparently.
Enter Trace, a public audit layer launched today. Trace records data provenance and licensing on the blockchain, then generates confidential receipts that verify legitimacy in seconds – and ensure contributors get paid. The foundation calls it a "trusted ecosystem" that covers everything from data collection to settlement.
Management has been overhauled to match the pivot. Andrea Muttoni, Story's former chief product officer and an ex-Amazon Alexa evangelist, becomes CEO. Kled founder Avi Patel takes the role of chief data officer. Story co-founder Lee Seung-yoon moves to Poseidon, an AI data infrastructure firm incubated by Story that also received backing from Andreessen Horowitz. Poseidon will operate on the DATA network.
"The AI industry's core challenge is shifting beyond computing power to securing data and proving its origin," Muttoni said. "We will add transparency and auditability to the world's largest pool of AI training data."
Patel added that suppliers who can clearly show how they obtained data will hold the advantage going forward.
Existing IP tokens will convert into DATA tokens at a 1:1 ratio. Token holders do not need to do anything – the swap happens automatically. The restructuring is effective immediately. Watch for the first Trace audit receipts to be published on the DATA network within the next two weeks, and for Kled's contributor count to climb as more AI labs seek verified datasets.
Story rebrands as DATA Foundation to build trusted AI data platform with Kled merger
Story, now DATA Foundation, merged with data marketplace Kled to provide verified, user-consented data for AI developers. This helps AI labs access legal and quality data while ensuring contributors are paid transparently.