AI is moving beyond the browser and into the real world. The bottleneck? Data. Today we’re announcing a $15M seed round led by @a16zcrypto to build infra that collects, curates, and licenses high-quality data for physical AI. Incubated by and built on @StoryProtocol.

The next wave of AI won't just live in your browser. And the frontier isn't compute or models. Coming soon – stay tuned.

The House just made history by passing major legislation on stablecoins (GENIUS Act) and market structure (CLARITY Act) in an overwhelmingly bipartisan way. This is a huge moment for crypto and for all Americans. We’re very close to having comprehensive, proactive rules in place for the first time. Next up: the GENIUS Act goes to the President’s desk for his signature. After that, the Senate should pass the CLARITY Act. We believe passing these laws is the best way to ensure that America remains the world leader in the next era of the internet. Thank you to all the cosponsors of these bills and the incredible supporters on both sides of the aisle in Congress.

<The Next Chapter Begins: Welcoming Sandeep Chinchali as Chief AI Officer> Last week, we shared Story’s Chapter 2. Our vision is to build the AI-native infrastructure for the seventy trillion dollar IP economy. Today, that vision moves forward. I’m excited to welcome @SPChinchali as our Chief AI Officer. When I first saw Sandeep’s background (Stanford PhD, NASA JPL, UT Austin professor, early engineer at a startup acquired by VMware), I expected an interdeeply technical, academic profile. What stood out was how clearly he connected his expertise to what actually needs to be built. He has spent over a decade working on one of AI’s hardest problems: how to capture and structure the right real-world data to train intelligent systems. He has collected and labeled long-tail data, trained models on edge devices, and faced the same limitations AI labs now encounter. His belief in crypto came from firsthand experience. He saw it as the only viable foundation for incentives, provenance, and coordination at scale. Over time, that conviction became sharper. After years of working on these problems in robotics labs, in classrooms, and at startups, Sandeep came to a clear conclusion: solving them requires something purpose built. When he saw what we had built at Story, it clicked instantly. This was the missing piece. And he brings people with him. One of the things I noticed early on in our conversations is how often he talks about his students. Not just in passing, but with real pride and curiosity. He references what they’re building, what excites them, what questions they’re asking. And somehow, those stories always loop back to what we’re working on at Story. That habit of weaving ideas across people and disciplines isn’t performative. It’s just how he thinks. That curiosity and openness are part of what make him such a powerful communicator. He doesn’t reduce complexity for the sake of accessibility. He builds bridges. Whether he’s talking to researchers, builders, or partners, he meets people where they are and brings them forward. It’s exactly the kind of mindset that fits the moment. The direction of AI is increasingly clear. The competition is no longer about compute or model design. Compute is concentrated. Models are cloned within weeks. What remains scarce is data: especially IP-cleared, real-world data that cannot be scraped or simulated. In the past few months, leading AI teams have come to us looking for infrastructure that makes this kind of data usable. They want systems where provenance, permissions, and royalty flows are embedded from the start. Story is the only infrastructure specifically designed to enable this at scale. We register real-world data as IP, track its full lifecycle from capture to annotation to synthetic generation, and route royalties across all contributors. To lead this effort, we needed more than technical expertise. We needed someone who could match the scale and ambition of what we’re building: someone with the rare combination of deep systems thinking, hands-on experience, and genuine curiosity. That is Sandeep. He has built across robotics, machine learning, and decentralized infrastructure. Just as importantly, he brings openness and intellectual generosity that makes him a connector. He listens closely, draws insights across domains, and grounds everything in the bigger picture. That combination of rigor, clarity, and purpose is exactly what this moment calls for. Sandeep will lead Story’s AI strategy across research, product, and ecosystem development, including the launch of new primitives for decentralized data and training. This is an important step forward for Story. We believe data IP will define the next era of AI. With Sandeep on board, that future is within reach. Let’s build. More to come next week.

I’ve spent my career chasing one question: How do we gather the right data to make AI work in the real world? From Stanford labs to UT Austin classrooms, I searched everywhere. The answer isn’t another AI lab, but a blockchain built to treat data as IP. That’s why I am joining @StoryProtocol as their Chief AI Officer. At Stanford, I studied “cloud robotics,” how fleets of robots could use distributed compute to learn together. I even mounted a dashcam in my car to solve this: If robots could only upload 5–10% of what they see, how do we pick the most valuable data? Most of it was boring freeway footage. But <1% captured rare scenes: self-driving Waymos, construction sites, unpredictable humans. That “long-tail” data made models smarter. I hand-labeled it, even paid Google Cloud’s labeling service to annotate my footage with niche concepts like “LIDAR unit” and “autonomous vehicle”, and trained models that ran on a USB-sized TPU. But academia only goes so far. At UT Austin, my questions shifted: → How do we crowdsource rare data to improve ML? → What incentive systems actually work? That pulled me into crypto – blockchains, token economies, even DePIN. I blogged, wrote papers on decentralized ML, but still wondered: who’s actually building this infrastructure? By total chance, I met the Story team. I was invited to give a talk at their Palo Alto office. It was 6PM, room still packed. I rambled about “Neuro-Symbolic AI” and ended with a slide called “A Dash of Crypto.” That talk turned into an advisory role, which now turned into something much bigger. We’re at a pivotal moment. Compute is mostly solved. Model architectures are copied overnight. The real moat is data. Not scraped Reddit. Not endless language. But rights-cleared, long-tail, real-world data that trains embodied AI – robots, AVs, systems that navigate our messy world. Imagine this: I capture a rare driving scene on dashcam & register it on Story. A friend labels it. An AI agent creates synthetic variants. On Story’s graph-structured chain, each becomes linked IP. Royalties flow back automatically. Everyone gets paid, every step traceable on-chain. That’s why I’m now Chief AI Officer at Story building the rails for decentralized, IP-cleared training data. It’s time to make data the new IP. Story is the place to do it. Much more to come soon. Let’s go.

The legal side of Story is what makes it so powerful. In the spirit of building in the open, here's a sneak peek at something we're cooking on the licensing side. Programmable Person License (PPL 👥): the world's first person-focused programmable licensing framework for name, image, and likeness. As AI gets better at replicating humans, your digital identity becomes your most valuable asset. PPL makes it programmable. This builds on our existing Programmable IP License (PIL 💊), the universal legal framework we created with top law firms for creative content. PIL already powers 200,000+ IP assets on Story and will keep getting updated and improved too! More soon.