Innovobot Resonance Ventures and the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation led the round for the Saint John-based startup, with participation from Island Capital Partners, RiSC Capital and Velocity Fund. (BetaKit)

Talking point: Independent film studios and content creators can use Versos’s marketplace to prepare and license their footage to AI developers to train models. It sells tech firms on the ability to assemble datasets by genre, language and other content characteristics, so their systems learn from the right material. Publishers and authors have sued OpenAI, Cohere and other makers of large language models over copyright infringement, which the tech firms deny.  Legal action has now crossed over into video; in June, Disney and Universal filed a lawsuit against Midjourney, which claims training is fair use. Versos is positioning its marketplace as a way for both sides to avoid those fights. Some developers are going direct—Toronto’s Moonvalley says it licensed the data for its movie-making models from YouTube creators and small production houses.