Factmata managed to land an investment from Dallas billionaire Mark Cuban by means of sending an email pitch.
Photo: Milkos via istock
The British anti-fake-news startup focused on eliminating misinformation problems that exist on the web through artificial intelligence, has completed it’s seed round with the help of Cuban, according to Business Insider. Funding amounts were not disclosed, but the business publication said other seed investors included Zynga Founder Mark Pincus and Brightmail Founder Sunil Paul.
Factmata CEO Dhruv Ghulati told Business Insider he “had a key list of people he wanted to have on board.”
“I was impressed by the team’s pedigree, technical talent, and sheer drive to solve this problem,” Cuban said in a statement to Business Insider.
Cuban has been in the midst of AI discussions recently judging the Digital Dallas Fight Club event and pushing for the use of AI in creative ways.
During the South By Southwest Conference and Festivals in Austin earlier this year, Cuban said “the world’s first trillionaires are going to come from somebody who masters AI and all its derivatives and applies it in ways we never thought of.”
A meld of Wikipedia and Quora, Factmata will call upon a community of users to fact check or mark quality of news articles with the aid of AI. Journalists and the public alike will be able to contribute to the fact checking site.
The goal is to have a “state-of-the-art fact-checking system using machine intelligence,” according to the Factmata website.
It expects to launch it’s first product by next year, according to Business Insider.
It will be the latest tool in the fight against fake news. Facebook has launched features aimed to flag misinformation and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales started Wikitribune earlier this year.
Locally, a team of researchers from the University of Texas at Arlington and the University of Texas at Dallas are working to build computer tools to detect social bots on the web that create and spread fake news.
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