ProRata tackles fractional monetisation of generative AI

The start-up claims to be able to identify the sources that have contributed to the generation of content by an AI. Several media and entertainment giants have already signed agreements with it.

Universal Music has become the first music major to sign a strategic partnership agreement with ProRata, a US start-up founded in 2024 that claims to have developed proprietary technology to analyse content output generated by an AI model and accurately identify the sources that contributed to its creation.

The company has developed a model for compensating contributors based on a concept of fractional attribution, which allows them to receive a share of the revenue generated by a derivative work in proportion to their contribution to the final result, based on a 50/50 sharing key with rights holders.

“We can take the result of generative AI, whether it's a text, an image, music or a film, and determine the origin of its components," says CEO and founder Bill Cross, an American serial entrepreneur known for inventing the pay-per-click model for search engine advertising in the late 1990s, whose patents were bought by Google¹.

A technical challenge

ProRata, which is still awaiting validatio…