The Data Foundation

Story Protocol, Inc., doing business as PIP Labs, is the research and development company behind Story Protocol, a blockchain built to let creators register intellectual property, set programmable licensing terms, and get compensated when that IP is used or remixed by others. The company was co-founded by SY Lee (previously founder of Radish, a serial-fiction app sold to Kakao) and Jason Zhao, and closed a $54 million Series A round in September 2023 backed by Andreessen Horowitz and Paris Hilton's 11:11 Media.

Story Protocol went on to raise an $80 million Series B in August 2024, led again by Andreessen Horowitz's crypto fund at a $2.25 billion post-money valuation, with participation from Polychain Capital. At the time, PIP Labs described more than 200 teams registered to build on the network and over 20 million addressable pieces of IP tracked on the platform. Story Protocol's mainnet, positioned as 'the world's intellectual property network,' launched in February 2025, and by mid-2025 Grayscale had launched a dedicated investment trust offering exposure to Story's $IP token.

Heading into 2026, PIP Labs has been repositioning the project around DATA Network, a layer-1 blockchain focused on sourcing, verifying, and licensing human-generated data for AI training — through products such as Numo and Kled for data sourcing, Poseidon for data refinement, and Trace as a public audit layer — while delaying a scheduled $IP token unlock by six months as the company argued that its business model has shifted toward off-chain enterprise licensing deals rather than on-chain transaction volume.