(Image source from: techcrunch.com)

TruStory, a Los Angeles based startup founded by Indian America Preethi Kasireddy, has raised $3 million in seed funding.

A startup, an online fact-checking platform that was launched seven months ago aim is to build a world-class engineering, design and community development team to work towards its mission.

The platform lets users to find and validate various claims people make on blogs, website and social media posts.

The funding is led by True Ventures, had participation from Pantera Capital, Kindred Ventures, Homebrew, Coinbase Ventures, Wonder Ventures, Abstract Ventures, Ausum Ventures, and Dream Machine (Alexia Tsotsis) and among others.

“It’s an honor to have each of these partners on board,” Kasireddy wrote on Medium.

Kasireddy grew up in New Jersey, a blockchain engineer from University of South Carolina and later she ended up quitting her job in silicon valley job to start TruStory.

According to Kasireddy, 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, a blockchain engineer, added that, in her experience as a developer in the blockchain space, including at the digital currency exchange Coinbase, she has been haunted by the proliferation of low-quality information, rampant inauthenticity, and sheer disinformation.

She further added, “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 - starting with the blockchain space.”

By Sowmya Sangam