Billionaire tech entrepreneur and Dallas Mavs owner Mark Cuban is funding the fight against fake news. He’s invested in a British startup that’s using artificial intelligence to weed out inaccurate online stories, according to Business Insider.
Cuban kicked in funding to a seed round for Factmata after getting a cold call from the company’s 25-year-old founder. Dhruv Gulati simply sent Cuban an email about the mission of his company and managed to win him over, according to the Business Insider report.
Ghulati told Business Insider that Cuban was on a list of people he hoped to count as investors. He also got funding for the seed round from Mark Pincus, founder of video game developer Zynga, and Sunil Paul, founder of spam-filtering company Brightmail that was acquired by Symantec.
The total funding raised and amount of money invested by Cuban were not disclosed.
Factmata’s first product, which is expected this year, is a news aggregator that will give content a quality score and provide related links. It plans to root out fake news by relying on artificial intelligence and a network of users to fact-check and mark suspicious news articles.
In a statement to Business Insider, Cuban said he invested in Factmata because he was “impressed by the team’s pedigree, technical talent, and sheer drive to solve this problem.”
“If we want to solve fake news, thinking about it at web scale via artificial intelligence and automation is the only way,” he said in the statement. “And being outside the media or fact checking world allows them to see the problem in a different way. Factmata is a group of entrepreneurs trying to solve a challenging problem with an amazing mission.”
Numerous companies, from tech giants like Google to startups like Factmata, are looking for creative approaches to stop the spread of rumors and misinformation. In late August, Facebook announced its latest step: blocking ads from Facebook pages that repeatedly share false stories.
Cuban is an active investor both on ABC’s reality show “Shark Tank” and off. He recently served as a judge at a Dallas tech event and has invested in Dallas startups, including fulfillment company Selery.
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