June 25, 2026 – Palo Alto, United States
Story rebranded as The DATA Foundation, launched DATA Network with groundbreaking Kled AI integration, and recorded 1.5 billion user-contributed records on the platform
The organization also offers Trace, the first public audit layer for approval, authorization, and data provenance at scale
Today, Story announces a strategic shift to become… Data Foundation (“DATA”) launches Trace, a connected registry that sources and licenses AI training data. The launch includes a major integration with Cladethe world’s largest voluntary human data marketplace, with 1.5 billion user-contributed records on the network. Andrea Motoni becomes CEO of the DATA Foundation, and Kled’s founder, Avi Patel, joins as a consultant as chief data officer.
AI training data has reached a bottleneck
The shift to data reflects where the market is pulling more strongly. AI training data has emerged as the most valuable and least soluble category in the intellectual property space. Frontier AI Labs has hit a multi-billion-dollar data bottleneck, effectively exhausting the Internet to extract it. The remaining supply is either expensive, custom-made, or legally unvalidated, leaving laboratories without a way to obtain data at scale, prove its provenance, or ensure its quality.
Legal risks are on the rise, as frontier laboratories roll out products that define the market based on data obtained through opaque networks, often without clear records of approval or jurisdiction. Stolen and undocumented data is no longer an option for enterprise-level AI.
“The challenge in AI has shifted from computation and architecture to identifying sources and provenance,” he said. “With the disintegration of the reversible web, the question for labs is now who keeps the receipts.” Andrea Mutoni, CEO to the Data Foundation. “With Kled, we combine complete data transparency and auditability with the largest collection of AI training data on the planet.”
Building trustworthy AI data infrastructure
DATA builds on the original mission of providing the data and intellectual property (IP) layer of the Internet, recognizing that the most important form of data and IP in this era is AI training data. DATA Network provides the core infrastructure for AI training, anchored by a key integration with Kled. Starting today, Kled’s licensing pipelines and contributor receipts run on the data network with additional support for stablecoin payments, which includes recording a staggering 1.5 billion user-contributed records with programmatic legal safeguards.
“Frontier Labs has exhausted the supply of high-quality, human-generated public texts available on the open web,” he said. “Vendors that show the provenance of their data sources will win the next decade of deals, and that is our bet.” Avi Patel, CEO and Founder to Clade and CDO is a part-time consultant Subordinate Data Foundation. “Instead of blindly acquiring data, Kled’s data marketplace and DATA’s auditable chain of custody are converging on what laboratories actually need to license data with confidence and transparency.”
Trace was launched as a public validation layer for AI training data
Trace, DATA Foundation’s public auditing and research platform, is also launching today alongside the Kled integration. Trace generates confidential and immutable receipts for each contribution, allowing labs to verify the legitimacy of datasets in seconds. For each record uploaded by users around the world, a data receipt will be generated, allowing initial compensation for contributor data and intellectual property. This addresses the urgent need for a verifiable and compliant AI training data market, which has become a legal and operational minefield.
Wider contributor network
DATA’s thesis has been validated by Poseidon, an AI data processing project incubated by Story, which cleans, normalizes and scores raw human data for validity and quality, ensuring that every record that reaches the buyer is model-ready. Poseidon’s early traction with frontier laboratories proved an opportunity for AI training data. Powered by a16z and now running entirely on DATA, its contributor app Numo is live today, bringing thousands of contributors into the AI economy in exchange for real-time payments.
“We started Story to build the IP layer of the Internet, and the most important IP in this era is the data you can’t extract: how a surgeon’s hands move, how a robot grips, how people talk, drive, and work in the real world,” he said. Si Lee, CEO of PIP Labs and Strategic Advisor to DATA Foundation. “Data is where this conviction goes next: an end-to-end network that proves the origin of real-world data, licenses it, and pays the people who make it.”
Symbolic migration and ecosystem continuity
The $IP token is migrated to DATA one-to-one with no action required by the current owners. Migration instructions, exchange timings, and FAQs are available here.
About Data Foundation
Data It is the biggest bottleneck in frontier AI. Data models for the most part either need to remain isolated from people and companies, or they do not yet exist, and will not exist, until the incentives to create them are aligned. The Data Grid is the world’s AI audit trails designed to answer the three questions every lab asks: Can you capture the data at scale, prove its provenance, and ensure its quality? Contributor apps, including Numo and Kled, provide subscribeable human data; Traceability gives each record a public, tamper-proof receipt; Poseidon turns them into model-ready datasets, so leading AI can continue to advance on a reliable basis. $IP is now DATA. More information is available at datafdn.org.
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