Custos Media Technologies has raised funding from Innovus, the university industry interaction and innovation company of Stellenbosch University. 

Custos is a bitcoin start-up that embeds bitcoin bounties as watermarks within videos and movies to fight piracy in digital media. When the media content is distributed without authorization, the small bitcoin reward is downloaded. Custos can see this transaction on the blockchain and informs the media owner about it. The service can be used, for example, to send a reviewer a pre-release version of a movie.

The investment from Innovus will be spent on promoting Custos among international clients and speeding the acquisition of the service by producers of videos and movies. The company is currently developing the movie piracy detection web service Screener Copy which is at the moment in closed beta and will be publicly released later in 2016. Custos plans to release a US-based client targeted at Hollywood companies.

“Screener Copy was built as a tool to rapidly bring Custos’ technology within reach of thousands of smaller movie studios worldwide,” Custos’ CEO G.-J. van Rooyen said.

“We can help our clients protect their content at the very sensitive screener distribution stage prior to box office release,” he added. 

Custos Media Technologies was founded by members of Stellenbosch University’s staff last July. The company raised seed funding from Stellenbosch University in 2014. It was one of 11 start-ups to pitch at the Cape Town leg of the Seedstars World competition. The company’s name, Custos, means “guard” in Latin.

Sonya Belova