Parm Sangha, Co-founder
AI is a conversation topic in every household, industry and government right now, and it’s only getting louder.
Behind that noise, we see the generative AI training data crisis as the unlocking event, not the thesis, driven by regulatory pressure, scraping litigation and model collapse from synthetic data.
Parallel to this, growth across sports and entertainment is saturating and fans are increasingly priced out. AI vendors need access to mass, consented data. Sports and entertainment need new revenue. Fans need real recognition of the value they create.
Mimo creates the economic gravity for one ecosystem where all three needs are met by the same continuous flow of data.
This summer gave us a real-world example of why that urgency is real. An unreleased OpenAI model was set loose to test its own defences and instead broke out, reaching Hugging Face’s systems without anyone intending it to. Consent wouldn’t have stopped that escape. It was a containment failure, not a data failure. But consent changes what an escape like that costs afterwards. Train on scraped, non-consented content, as much of the industry has been alleged to, and the same incident stops being a security embarrassment and becomes a legal one, as the company now has to answer for content it never had the right to use in the first place. Data brokers and model distillation (copying another model’s data output as your model’s input) carry the same exposure. Consented data doesn’t stop the next leak. It’s the difference between a leak you can survive and one you legally could not.
Clubs and entertainment brands know their fans and athletes are a content engine, where thousands of phones capturing angles no broadcast camera gets near. Almost none of that value flows back: it’s posted for free, reposted by pirate accounts and monetised almost entirely by the platforms hosting it. Our research with leading sports finance academics has quantified the real scale of this and we’ll share the numbers later in this series. Fan-generated content is the one major revenue line nobody has built yet and it’s sitting unmonetised in fans’ pockets today.
Every match, every gig, every fan’s phone produces moments nobody else has, made fresh again the very next weekend. Not scraped off the internet, not copied from another AI. Fans are also the most engaged, most willing audience to say yes to sharing those moments, if they’re paid fairly for it. A constantly renewing supply of original content, plus willing consent, is the combination the AI industry is missing and the one rights holders have never had a way to capture. That’s why we built Mimo here first.
We’re starting with sports and entertainment because it’s the fastest, highest-trust place to prove the belief. We’re not stopping here because sports is the ceiling - it’s the floor.
Fans and rights holders are the supply the whole system can depend on. The community and not any single company is what makes the network trustworthy. The value is the asset we all share in.
If you’re an AI company that needs training data you can actually defend - original, consented, renewing every day - this is worth a conversation. Register your data requirements here.
If you’re a rights holder watching fans generate exactly this value while you capture none of it, this is the same conversation from the other side. Talk to our partnerships team here.
And if you’re a fan or creator whose moments are the reason any of this works, the door opens for you too. Register your interest here.
Either way, the Mimo doors opened this summer.