Story Rebrands as DATA Foundation, Integrates AI Data Platform Kled

Story, a blockchain project, is rebranding as the DATA Foundation and remaking itself into an AI data infrastructure company. The foundation plans a technical integration with Kled, a global marketplace for AI training data, to build a trusted ecosystem spanning data collection to settlement.

The restructuring is aimed at addressing a bottleneck facing frontier AI labs in securing data at scale. Existing web data is approaching exhaustion after indiscriminate scraping, while legal risks including copyright issues have grown. The foundation said the industry urgently needs infrastructure that can transparently verify the origin of data used to train AI models and manage its quality.

As part of the plan, the foundation will integrate Kled's 1.1 billion user-consented data points into the DATA network. Kled is an app that pays users in real time for data they voluntarily provide. It attracted 200,000 contributors within two weeks of launch. The platform is now handling as many as 4.5 million file uploads a day, mainly in robotics and physical AI. It has also raised $11 million from global investors, including Sebastian Thrun, who led Google's Waymo project.

The foundation also formally launched Trace, a public audit layer that records data provenance and licensing on the blockchain. Trace generates confidential receipts that can verify a dataset's legitimacy within seconds and help ensure contributors are properly compensated.

The organization also carried out a broad management overhaul to match the strategic shift. Andrea Muttoni, Story's former chief product officer and a former senior technical evangelist for Amazon Alexa, was appointed chief executive officer. Kled founder Avi Patel will also serve as chief data officer of the DATA Foundation.

Story co-founder Lee Seung-yoon will move to Poseidon, an AI data infrastructure company incubated by Story, as chief strategy officer and chairman. Poseidon, which has received backing from venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, will also operate on the DATA network.

"The AI industry's core challenge is shifting beyond computing power to securing data and proving its origin," Chief Executive Officer Andrea Muttoni said. "We will add transparency and auditability to the world's largest pool of AI training data."

Chief Data Officer Avi Patel said suppliers that can clearly prove how they obtained data will hold the advantage going forward.

Under the restructuring, the ecosystem's existing IP token will be converted into the DATA token at a 1:1 ratio. Token holders do not need to take any separate action.