London startup Factmata has secured $750,000 (£575,000) in Seed funding for its artificial intelligence project aimed at tackling fake news.
The firm raised funding from American businessman, investor and television personality Mark Cuban; Mark Pincus, the founder of Zynga; Ross Mason, the founder of enterprise software company MuleSoft; and Sunil Paul, founder of anti-email spam software company Brightmail.
Factmata, which previously raised a €50,000 grant from Google’s Digital News initiative, hopes to use artificial intelligence to turn internet users into a fact-checking network in a model similar to Wikipedia.
Citizens can use the tool to instantly fact check claims made on Twitter, Facebook and in news articles.
Factmata will use this latest investment to develop the platform, so users can uncover additional context, score information for quality and debate content validity.
Dhruv Ghulati, CEO and co-founder, said: “Because of an influx of misleading information on the web, trust in the validity of online news is at an all-time low. We want to help restore that trust.”
“Through our platform, we want to ensure that original sources and hard research are disseminated to people in real time so that they can form reasoned opinions. Artificial intelligence makes this possible,” the 25-year-old added.
Mark Cuban said he was impressed by the Factmata team’s “pedigree, technical talent, and sheer drive to solve this problem”.
He went on to say that artificial intelligence and automation is key to solving the fake news problem.
“Factmata is a group of entrepreneurs trying to solve a challenging problem with an amazing mission,” Cuban concluded.