Pex, the market leader in digital rights technology, is announcing a $57m investment round. The round was joined by existing investors with additional participation from Tencent, Tencent Music Entertainment, the CueBall Group, NexGen Ventures Partners, Amaranthine, and others.

The investment will help scale Pex’s Attribution Engine (AE), the licensing infrastructure for a better Internet. AE creates a single marketplace for digital content, transforming how creators, rightsholders, and platforms do business together by enabling fair compensation and increased access to copyrighted content. It stands to break the bottleneck of online content licensing once and for all.

“Attribution is vital to the Internet; it can help protect copyright without stifling creation,” says Pex founder and CEO Rasty Turek. “AE sets new standards in speed and scale and is the first platform capable of meeting today's content growth and demands. It replaces unreliable upload filters and takedown requests with real-time use authorization and licensing, benefiting creators while recognizing and compensating those whose works are sampled and shared.”

Governments across the world are moving to put legislation in place to address the growing imbalance between social media behemoths and artists who aren’t getting their fair share. Most notably, the EU’s Copyright Directive and its Article 17 set forth decisive, market-shifting legislation with global impact to address the value disparity in a meaningful way. “We live in a world where everyone is creating, mixing and remixing copyrighted works. But the ability to rapidly identify, attribute, and license them in real-time is the missing link to address the value-gap. Instead of fearing regulations, or finding loopholes to make them toothless, what if we relied on a better infrastructure for today’s Internet?” asks Pex COO Amadea Choplin. “If we could seamlessly compensate artists – if we could enable a culture of fair and universal attribution – then we could set the stage for a truly free and open Internet.”
 
“The solution to this puzzle lies not with litigation, legislation, or innovation alone, but with the combined strength of sound law, breakthrough technology, and durable social norms. In short, we need a leap forward in trust,” Choplin explains.
 
Pex has spent seven years breaking new ground and pushing technologies to new limits. "My vision has always been to deliver a set of technologies that brought transparency, accuracy, and most importantly trust to digital rights and content” notes Turek. “I feel Pex has now accomplished that and with this round of funding we are well positioned for what lies ahead."