rights-management
(9)
Melanie Nelson Put an AI Rep on the Night Shift - Then the Numbers Woke Up
The Rightsline CMO has spent a career making invisible infrastructure legible. Her latest move gave an AI sales agent the unanswered website traffic - and gave the board numbers it could understand.
Rightsline Built the Operating System for Hollywood’s Messiest Spreadsheet - Now It Wants Every IP Business
A title can be available in Tokyo, blocked in Toronto and still owe three people money in London. Rightsline turned that contractual hairball into enterprise software - and a $500 million growth bet.
Yoav Zimmerman
Yoav Zimmerman is a San Francisco founder and machine learning engineer who is CEO and co-founder of Third Chair (YC X25), an AI-native IP enforcement agent that helps rightsholders find, stop, and monetize unauthorized use of their content. A Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, he previously co-founded the social video analytics startup Trendpop (YC W21), grew it past $1M ARR with clients like Universal Music Group and MrBeast, and exited to Collab. Before startups he worked on machine learning at Google and at Determined AI.
Third Chair
Third Chair is an AI-native IP enforcement and licensing platform that helps rightsholders find who is using their content, trademarks, and likeness without permission and turn that unauthorized use into revenue. Backed by Y Combinator (X25) and FundersClub with $2.3M raised, it pairs AI agents that monitor, investigate, and draft demand letters with an on-demand network of lawyers. Customers - including Universal Music Group and much of the recorded-music industry - used the product to generate more than $1M in revenue in the last six months of 2025.
Hook
Hook is a New York-based music technology company behind an AI-powered social app that lets fans legally remix and mash up licensed songs into short-form clips for social media. By combining a catalog of over 20 million licensed recordings with AI tools for genre-shifting, tempo changes and video editing, Hook aims to turn unauthorized fan remixing into a channel that keeps artists and rights holders in control - and paid. Founded by former JioSaavn COO Gaurav Sharma, the company launched on iOS in early 2026 and raised a $10 million Series A led by Khosla Ventures.
ScorePlay
ScorePlay is an AI-powered media asset management platform built specifically for the sports industry. It centralizes photos, videos and live broadcast content into one system, then uses computer vision and facial recognition to automatically tag athletes, sponsors and moments so teams, leagues and federations can find and distribute content in seconds instead of hours. Founded in 2021 and headquartered in New York, ScorePlay is used by 200+ sports organizations worldwide and raised a $13M Series A in February 2025.
Trip Adler
Trip Adler is a San Francisco tech founder who co-founded Scribd in 2007 and ran it for 16 years, building it into a reading platform used by roughly 100 million people. In 2024 he launched Created by Humans, a licensing marketplace that lets authors and other creators set terms and get paid when AI companies use their work to train and run models. His pitch is not to fight AI in court but to build the plumbing for a fair market between creators and the labs racing to license high-quality content.
Thismoment
Thismoment was a San Francisco marketing-technology company that built the Thismoment Content Cloud, a digital storytelling platform that helped the world's biggest brands monitor, moderate, secure rights to, and publish user-generated content alongside professionally produced media across social, web, and mobile touchpoints. Founded in 2007-2008 by gaming and tech veterans Vince Broady, Ankarino Lara, and Scott Bedard, it served more than 150 brands and agencies including Coca-Cola, Salesforce, Sephora, Levi's, Microsoft, Mazda, and AB InBev, and raised more than $50 million across four institutional rounds.
Mark Spier
Mark Spier is the founder and CEO of Royalty Solutions Corp, a New York royalty-accounting and copyright-administration firm whose tagline is 'you make the Music, we do the Math.' A Cornell-trained computer scientist with a Columbia MBA, he spent early years at IBM and as a VP at Credit Suisse before taking over Memory Lane Music Group in 2003, the family publishing house his grandfather started in 1923. In 2009 he founded Royalty Solutions to bring transparency and software to the messy business of paying songwriters, building proprietary systems like the TuneLicensing mechanical-licensing engine and a client royalty portal.