Fireside Chat: Scaling Trust in the Global Marketplace

Hi everyone. Thank you so much for joining our exclusive fire chat today. Fireside chat today with Mark. Um my name is Suzy and I'll be hosting um as we explore a conversation that could not be more timely. This week we're announcing MarqVision's series B funding which is a really big milestone for us um to help brands protect their intellectual property and maintain control um in this fast changing um world. Today we're talking with Mark, our CEO, and discussing uh what this means for us and for the future of our company. Congratulations, Mark. This is really amazing, especially for me because I've been here for a while now um as one of MarqVision's first interns at one point. And you know, I think that it'll be a really great conversation to unpack what this means for our company, but also what innovations that we have coming up in the pipeline and what what's going to do for the world of brand protection. And so, join me in welcoming Mark, our CEO and founder. Thanks for being here and again, congratulations. 

‍

Thanks for having me.

‍

Great. Well, could you just start off by talking to us a little bit about the journey to this point and what this milestone represents for us?

‍

Yeah, absolutely. So, series B is of course a very meaningful milestone for us. Um, not because raising a lot of money in and of itself is a milestone, but because series B generally represents that the company is very scalable, it could one day become a really big company. And uh what investors usually check for at the series B round is the market size risk. Will this business be at least 10 times bigger than it is today? And this is extremely challenging to show in the industry we're in uh because as we all know online brand protection market historically is is known to be small. There aren't any unicorns that we know of or companies with revenue more than $200 million. And and so our our quest was to show that we're not a traditional online brand protection company. We're not here to do just anti-counterfeiting or anti-piracy. We're actually building a business that is a lot bigger than that. And completing a $48 million series B round basically means that we have proved to the market and investors that we are what we are. We are the AI powered managed service platform for brand control. And what this means is that because we're not just a SaaS company, we're not just a tool selling company, but an AI services company. We're we're not here to just sell productivity tools. We're really trying to sell the the great outcome of services. Brand protection also is traditionally about reacting to copycats or or being compliant legally. But brand control is more about recovering uh revenue by by owning every digital and physical touch point where a brand lives. So in the end we were able to prove that we could be 50x to 100x bigger than the current players in the market. And I think the fact that we're able to raise the round successfully basically shows the the huge potential we have in front of us. 

‍

Yeah, that's really amazing. And you know, I I remember when I first joined the company, you had painted out this picture of not just like one piece of software that we're creating, but we're creating kind of this like operating system that is going to kind of revolutionize the way that brand protection and brand control is done at all these companies. So, with the new funding, we also did a rebrand and relaunched kind of our website and how our our business kind of looks and feels. Uh, I'd love to hear a little bit more about your thoughts behind that rebrand and why we did it. 

‍

So in in line with our mission which is to protect and build a future shaped by original ideas, innovations and creativity, we want to continuously launch new products and services that can help global brands accomplish their goals. And if you looked at our new logo, we have this four-way arrows in the in the new logo which symbolize the four major areas of IP services. So we have IP protection, IP management, IP licensing, and IP generation. The four core areas that we've always been talking about when we're thinking about building the infrastructure for IP life cycle. So our rebrand really tries to incorporate incorporate the the broader mandate we

have as an all-in-one IP infrastructure, but at the core of it, of course, is the the protection of IP, which is symbolized by the shield inside our new logo. So yeah, that that's the basically the the key to the our rebrand story.

‍

Yeah, it's like a little behind the scenes what our our logo means. Um, which is pretty awesome. And when you look at the IP landscape today, what do you think has changed the most in the last 2 to 3 years? Because you know when we started out um a couple years ago right it was pre the AI like kind of revolution but it was also you know when online e-commerce was first booming during COVID and so a lot a lot has changed in the last 2 to 3 years, so I'd love to hear a little bit more about what the key things that you've noticed or reflected on um in the e-commerce space and also just like on the online brand protection face. 

‍

Yeah. Well, I think there are things that have changed a lot during the past two, three years, and I think there are also things that haven't really changed at all. So, first of all, while we started out as an anti-counterfeiting company 3 years ago, today we're not only dealing with fake counterfeits, but we're also dealing with other forms of fakes and infringements such as digital piracy, unauthorized sales, impersonations, and even deep fakes. And the size of the online economy during the past two to three years has really exploded and and companies are currently projected to lose 600 billion in the next two years. And what has definitely changed is that Gen AI, the generative AI has become a catalyst for bad actors. And these bad actors now operate in a highly automated scalable manner using you know what we all call LLMs, large language models. So you can copy an entire website uh and and create fake website uh using these LLM tools in a matter of three seconds. You could you know very well orchestrate a large collection of fake social media profiles using these tools. These are you know things that have did not exist to three years ago and because of the rise of AI it's become a lot easier for scammers to orchestrate these kind of scams globally. At the same time, uh there are things that haven't changed a lot in my opinion, which is, you know, the type of companies that are supposed to fight these bad actors are are not really adopting to these change. They're they're moving actually slower than the counterfeits, the the scammers of the world, right? So what we call legacy IP service providers like the traditional online brand protection service companies or the BPOS or even the law firms still rely on manual processes you know old technology to tackle these online fake problem. So, you know, I I think it's inevitable that there's got to be a new solution, a new company that can help brand professionals, IP professionals tackle these problems in a highly scalable and automated way using the latest technology. And that's what MarqVision is all about. We're here to fill in the gap. And hopefully with the new technologies that we build, we can really help these brand professionals and we can supercharge their ability to manage these infringements, tackle these problems all across the world. 

‍

Yeah, I think that's definitely true because one of my favorite things that we did as a company was help MSCHF get trade dress for the big red boot. And the way we did that was by essentially proving that they were they had reached a certain level of virality by demonstrating data from our platform and then helping them generate new IP, which was really awesome because that's probably never been done before. We collaborated with a brand that is quite iconic and and has kind of been pushing the limits of IP these days. But that also means that, you know, they used our technology to do that and that was a new way that USPTO actually approved new IP generation. So that's really exciting to me and I'm looking forward to how that will help other brands generate more IP. 

‍

Absolutely.

‍

I think we can move on to kind of talking about our funding strategy. Was there any particular moment during uh the fundraising period when you felt like investors went from looking just at the metrics uh and then moving on to really buying into you and your vision um for where this company could go? 

‍

Yeah. Um it's interesting because we've been doing this business for the past three, four years now but this rise of new concept called um AIEL services and AIEL services becoming an investment thesis among top technology investors earlier this year which was not too long ago was was definitely a pivotal turning point for us. So while our business model has remained consistent over the past 3 years, the market previously described us simply as a software company with with uh what we call humans in the loop. We have technology, but we have our our specialists, brand protection specialists were kind of working alongside technology and they were called the humans in the loop. And it was not from a technology investor's perspective, it was not the best business model because you always wanted to invest in, you know, high gross

margin uh software businesses where there are no human elements and it it was all about automation and just like using tools. This perception has shifted dramatically with the creation of LLMs and AI which now enable us to scalably perform work that was once thought possible only through human effort. So I think we all kind of experienced that inside MarqVision. You know there are a lot of these complicated tasks that we thought okay oh man this is something that only humans would be able to do and all of a sudden we see that AIs are able to replicate uh 90 to 95% of what humans can do. So it is quite amazing what we can automate and this shift redefined our category and positioned our company at the forefront of the AIE services movement and as a result the round quickly became highly competitive with many investors who share this thesis eager to participate, and I think one of the strengths of MarqVision of course is that we are actually working with 350 global companies we're not a conceptual company we're not at a stage we're just developing being interesting technology but we are actually using the technology AI services and we're deploying that to real customers uh solving real problems. I think that was like one of the key uh reasons why these top investors bought into our vision and and also our our team. 

‍

Yeah. Especially that like customer piece is really important because these brands and companies are also going through huge digital transformations of trying to get AI to lead or be a part of their workflow um and and really transforming the way that people work today faster and more effectively. And so I definitely think that that's kind of where the direction of work is going

in general. Um, what do you think or how do you think that this new investment is going to accelerate your ability to protect brands across more markets then, especially because uh as an AI services it's it's becoming easier or maybe faster?

‍

Yeah. So we're really serious about investing in our technology and we're going to invest about 50% of our investment. So you know about $20 million in expanding the size of our engineering team, right? So we will grow our engineering and AI teams to accelerate the automation and drive generative AI implementation across all of our product suite. Um and this will allow our customers to see uh even a greater impact of of our work uh in in terms of both the the saturation rates, ROI, cleanliness rate and all that. So invest in technology first and foremost. Second, uh we're going to invest about 20% of our um series B funding, so about $10 million into the regional expansion and and more specifically regional expansion inside Asia. So we will establish and grow teams in key markets uh such as China and Japan uh and we will try to deepen our operational capabilities in the region. Um as you know you know we have received investments from top venture capitals in China and Japan and and they have invested in a lot of these great marketplaces e-commerce businesses. So we will try to leverage their portfolio companies and try to establish an exclusive relationship with key marketplaces in the region and we will be able to deliver unmatched services to our customers in terms of the takedown speed, the compliance rate, the accuracy and all that. And then lastly uh we're going to be building new products, right? So we are again we're all about innovation, building new technologies and rolling out new products. And without disclosing too much detail here, we will invest in adjacent products across the IP life cycle to to really expand our platform so that customers would be using MarqVision for pretty much everything they do related to IP workflow. So from IP creation to IP management to IP protection all the way to IP monetization or IP licensing, our brands, our customers will be using leveraging our product to get all of those things done. So, we will continue to um invest in our products and we think that that's the future.

‍

And I think on that note, I'd love to hear a little bit more about how your legal background shaped the way that you're building an AI company. I know there are a lot of um overlaps in that

space, especially in the world of IP. Do you find yourself thinking about you know the the risks um or contracts and IP strategy differently than maybe your peers in the space? 

‍

You know it's interesting because when I started when I founded MarqVision four years ago, AI at the time was more of a kind of deep technology. So most people that were running and founding AI companies were you know PhD dropouts. They were studying computer vision at MIT. So I was probably the only non-engineering major who was kind of working on this AI startup. But I think obviously a lot has changed over the past 5 years and in a world where technology especially large language models is increasingly being commoditized because Open AI and anthropics of the world are building incredible models. You don't have to build the models yourself. I think the real competitive advantage lies in deeply understanding customers and their problems. So my background in IP and legal, I majored in like trademarks and copyrights at law school really gave me this unique insight into both the scale and complexity of these challenges. So I was able to basically design a product that you know mimics what the IP workflow looks like for a lot of our customers and we were able to build a product that could really go with the existing workflow of our customers. I think it also kind of gave me the intuition that this is a there is a hundred billion dollar market opportunity in this space which is an intuition probably that most people wouldn't have and I likely wouldn't have it without the legal foundation I had. So yeah, I I think the legal background definitely shaped the course of our company and it is being very helpful.

‍

Yeah, I think definitely the deep commitment to our customers has always been at this company and perhaps it comes from your legal background, right? Cause lawyers tend to be really really

committed to their customers. That's that's really important in the line of work that they do and that we do. And so that focus is is incredibly important. And I'm not sure if this is allowed to be in the webinar. Um, but it also taught me from from observing you, Mark, um, that you can go to law school and come out a venture or a ventureback startup CEO instead of becoming a lawyer. Um it was really interesting to see someone who was going into the world of legal tech and or pursuing the world of legal tech uh compared to maybe taking the kind of the road that has always been taken by by many attorneys. Great. Well, we'll move on to talking a little bit about innovation and technology uh and how our company is changing. You know, outside of our legal and IP teams, about 60% of our users uh come from marketing, e-commerce, and sales. So, these are not really traditional brand protection personas. Um, and so I'd like to hear a little bit more about at what point you realized that MarqVision's product could reach a broader audience than you were originally expecting because we thought maybe this would only be something that legal teams would use, but we've actually been servicing a lot of more business go to market teams as as our business has grown. 

‍

Yeah. Um, so yeah, I mean we we began as an anti-counterfeiting company using AI to detect and remove counterfeits online and there were actually a lot of companies doing the same thing. And one thing that we have observed over and over again was that it wasn't clear in the traditional brand protection industry what kind of value these brand protection companies are delivering to customers because it was always about the number of takedowns um the compliance rate and all that. But at the end of the day, and we experienced this firsthand as well, like the customers were always asking, "What is the impact of all this work?" And I don't understand the difference between taking down 100 counterfeit versus a thousand counterfeit. But over time, we realized that the right level of technological maturity, with the right level of technological maturity, we could do far more than just takedowns. With the right prioritization and real automation, not not fake automation but real automation, we could directly impact brands online sales because you could actually, you know, impact the cleaniness rate and the saturation rate of counterfeits inside marketplaces. And if you get rid of enough uh uh you know counterfeits or authorized sales in a in a in a short time frame, then you can actually affect uh brands online sales. So from that moment, our focus shifted to building capabilities that help companies recover their loss revenue. And today, many brands see that using MarqVision, they see a 5% uplift in revenue. So it is an incredible impact that we're bringing to our customers. And as a result, our product now resonates not only with the IP and legal teams that are interested in, you know, delivering business impact themselves, but also with the go to market teams themselves. So sales, marketing, head of e-commerce, all of them measure our impact through revenue recovery. So this is something that has definitely um changed over the past few years. And as our technology gets better, uh we're seeing that we can deliver more revenue impact to our customers. And this is allowing more go to market teams to use MarqVision. 

‍

Yeah, I definitely think that, you know, moving from the concept that legal is always going to be a cost center to maybe helping generate revenue and or saving revenue has been a really meaningful shift um in in thinking about you know how how brands uh control their presence online. And I think that kind of segues into my next point, right? My next question about how we've sort of moved the vision of our company to go from brand protection to brand control. Um, and if you could explain that to someone outside of um our world, uh, that would be great. 

‍

Yeah. Uh so brand protection focuses on detecting and removing infringements such as counterfeits, you know, impersonations and authorized sales. So it's more about, the focus is on the take down. It it's the focus is on the enforcement whereas brand control is a much broader concept. It it really does the takedown too, but it enables companies to fully manage their digital presence and physical presence, but in the digital presence across e-commerce, social media, websites and chat platforms. So you would be able to get a lot of things done not just enforcement. Um and one example of that would be intelligence. So we are we started out as a brand protection company but once we established our identity as a brand control company we began to expand into the brand intelligence area and then we do that by helping companies uncover you know supply chain distribution patterns how to come up with strategy to optimize pricing how to access a comprehensive database for resellers. All of these things are kind of uh are key concepts under brand control and brand intelligence and and this is going way beyond what brand protection was able to do. So it it focuses on the revenue impact, the business impact and um legal teams, IP teams, but also go to market teams are able to use brand control to really have a positive impact in their online businesses. So again, we want to become the everything platform for brands and content companies. So evolving from a brand protection company to a brand control company was an inevitable path.

‍

Yeah, I think that's super powerful because this is the first time that maybe companies can imagine having a dashboard where everything lives in one place where they can work crossfunctionally with their colleagues in a way that they haven't been able to do before. And so I think it'll help brands kind of get to get to a place where brand control becomes a really well oiled machine for them so that they can see everything online and and have more meaningful conversations with each other about where the direction of the company is going and how to grow their brand instead of kind of always being in reactive mode to what's happening online with their with their brand. If they can't control it, right, then what is the meaning of trying to make something new? Yeah. If you could fast forward five years, how do you think this industry is going to look and change? And how do you think or what do you hope for MarqVision to be in that space?

‍

Yeah. So, one of the questions that we get a lot is, you know, how how is MarqVision different? because at the surface level if you look at our product versus some of these traditional legacy brand protection software they might look similar right we we have a I guess in my opinion that we have a more beautiful you know more intuitive UI/UX but from the eyes of you know most most customers at least from the outside it looks conceptually similar but I think at the core um MarqVision is different because we are building what we call a system of records or system of record, basically means it is a database where you put all of your information and and companies can kind of trust the SOR as the source of truth, right? And and so we try to whenever we onboard a customer, we try to really collect all the data points that we can collect from our customers. Uh so we try to put every asset uh brand or content companies need to manage and this includes the IP rights uh so trademarks and copyright certificates the digital assets the product catalogs the the list of authorized sellers and unauthorized sellers everything kind of goes into this single system of record and we continuously enrich this SOR with um with with the future intelligence patterns we find among to counterfeit certain infringement patterns. So we we have kind of underlying uh fully integrated repository of IP database and and that's what really allows us to build so many software so many applications on top of it. The reason we're able to launch new product every single quarter is because we have this giant database IP repository and we can easily build exciting applications on top of that. So fast forward five years, obviously the AI would be more powerful than today and AI agents will be doing most of the work and if you don't have this single layer of repository of IP database, it it's going to be very hard for the AI to operate. So I I think what we're doing we're building a foundation that will be instrumental uh for all the future products that we're going to build. And I think you know even though our product might look similar from the outside compared to other uh legacy software fundamentally there's a very big difference and the difference is something that you cannot actually see.

‍

Yeah, foundations matter and that foundation will always be the IP that powers these brands. So, I think that's incredibly important uh to think about when moving forward with creating products at our company um and how to use that foundation to launch products that are useful to our customers. I think to, you know, really tie it all in, I'd love to hear a little bit about what success looks for our company in the next 18 to 24 months. In a little bit of a smaller um time frame because the next um year and a half to two years is when a lot of the exciting stuff will take place. Um and so I'm looking forward to that time and I hope we have a lot of exciting things coming in the pipeline. 

‍

Yeah, I mean we internally say that the next 18 to 24 months is probably going to be the most exciting times in our company's history. So I think overall our journey has never been about chasing growth at all costs. We really care about customer experience and we want to build a scalable AI foundation before we you know just scale and add more customers to our list of customers. Uh but nevertheless we were still able to double our revenue each year. We're we're seeing even more acceleration in the recent quarters. So that discipline will guide us toward our next milestone which is the 100 million ARR and we we think we'll be able to reach 100 million ARR by um mid 2027 and this is also possible because our ambition is very simple right we want to become the IP operating backbone for every brand we want to be the IP infrastructure for all brands and so we're not going to be just you know using brand protection products or you know is having additional features, product features, but we will be actually having a lot of products. In fact, our ambition is to build 60 interoperable uh applications in our platform and that will uh really allow us to scale and and we want to become the most impactful brand control in the world by year 2027. So, yeah, so that's that's the plan. 

‍

Yeah, that's really awesome. Um, I think every time we've raised funding, I think that's been about twice now since I joined MarqVision, we always said it was going to be the most exciting time to be be at our company, but um I think it always gives me newfound exhilaration because now we have the money to be able to uh accomplish all the goals that we had set all those years ago. And so, um, it's really it's really great to see those things come true. Thank you. so much for joining me um to share a little bit more about what's coming for MarqVision and how you've

been thinking about this whole process. Thank you everyone who joined us today. Thanks for listening to our story.  Whether you're an brand owner or an IP professional who believes in the value of innovation, this conversation um is definitely, you know, a reminder that we are working hard um to build trust with you and we're going to actively try to defend that. This is really an exciting time for us and we're looking forward to sharing more with you and so stay tuned. We look forward to sharing more. Thanks.

‍