Indian American raises $3 million for startup TruStory

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Indian American Preethi Kasireddy has raised $3 million in seed funding for her online fact-checking platform TruStory which was launched seven months ago to “build a world-class engineering, design, and community development team to work towards.”

The funding was led by True Ventures and according to a blog post; Pantera Capital, Kindred Ventures, Homebrew, Coinbase Ventures, Wonder Ventures, Abstract Ventures, Ausum Ventures and Dream Machine joined in.

Other individuals also invested in the funding including Alok Vasudev, Fred Ehrsam, David King, Scott Belsky, Josh Elman and Jessica Verrilli.

“It’s an honor to have each of these partners on board. Unlike in today’s web where the onus for fact-checking is on the reader, in TruStory, every ‘story’ or claim goes through a unique validation process that leverages a distributed network of participants with robust economic and social incentives to surface the truth,” Kasireddy wrote in her blog post on Medium, explaining how the platform allows users to find out and validate various claims people make online on blogs, website and social media posts.

“When someone successfully validates a claim or else identifies aspects of an offering that doesn’t make sense, she or he will ‘earn tokens and reputation and influence’ for their efforts. And if they are proven to be fake or dishonest, then they will lose on all three fronts,” Kasireddy explained to BCFocus.

“The platform will be used to validate far more than white papers. We’re starting with crypto market and claims being made in white papers and websites and building a network to help investors and researchers who need this information to make the right decisions,” she told TechCrunch.

Kasireddy claims to be a blockchain engineer from Monroe, New Jersey who has a B.S. in industrial and systems engineering from the University of Southern California.

She ended up quitting her job in Silicon Valley to start TruStory.

“There are no longer universally trusted central parties to keep tabs on what’s real. That’s why I started TruStory. TruStory is a platform that uses the collective knowledge of the crowd, combined with the right incentives and disincentives, to validate and curate a better reality,” she added.