Dublin-based Ceartas, one of eight Irish startups to feature in the new Sifted 100: UK and Ireland leaderboard, was set up in the wake of a harrowing experience for founder Dan Purcell.
“I was a victim of revenge-porn,” Purcell tells Sifted.
Back in 2018, Purcell was preparing to take on a new job at Google — but was blindsided when his then-girlfriend confronted him when intimate videos from a previous relationship surfaced online.
“My reaction was: ‘What the fuck?’ The blood drained from my face. Then my whole life disintegrated in the space of a week,” he says. But he struggled to know what to do next. “Who wants to draw attention to something like this by calling a solicitor?”
Seeing few other options, Purcell — a self-taught computer programmer — decided to go after the culprits himself. “I wrote a web script and found the content but wasn’t sure how to get it removed. I was told I should claim copyright and get the material taken down that way.”
The plan worked — but Purcell carried on fighting content thieves, starting a company in 2021 to protect online creators and brands from intellectual property theft, abuse and deepfakes. “Friends of mine were being blackmailed with naked photos. I helped get some people arrested,” he tells Sifted.
For monthly subscriptions ranging from $49 to $260, Ceartas — the Irish word for justice — will set its bots to hunt copyrighted content and then automatically send legal notices to take down links. “We scan the internet 24/7. Our AI can do in one minute what it would take a human 120 minutes to do,” Purcell says.
YouTube creator KSI, as well as his group The Sidemen, are both clients and investors in the Dublin company, with Ceartas claiming to have removed more than 300k unlicensed images on their behalf.
AI is proving a good sleuth for tracking copyrighted material but the technology also helps stolen or adult material proliferate. AI-generated imagery that uses real people’s faces and identities is a growing problem.
A recent study found that 98% of deepfake videos online are pornographic, and 99% of those target women and girls.
Around the world, lawmakers are beginning to take action. For example, the UK, will soon become the first country to introduce laws cracking down on the use of AI tools to produce child sexual abuse images.
Ceartas has become an official safety partner of subscription service OnlyFans, where many adult creators host pornographic content — and also says it has Hollywood stars on its books, although Purcell declines to reveal who.
Having raised a $4.5m seed round in 2024, the company aims to raise a Series A this year, with plans to open an LA office.
Looking back at the terrible moment that changed his life, Purcell says: “I had to move out of my apartment, I had to start my life over. But I had to own it too.
“I said to myself: ‘I can cry in a corner or I can do something about it.’”
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/revenge-porn-ai-startup-tech-dublin/
