UBDI announced a great group of investors today in it’s $825k pre-seed round, which was led by DG Lab Fund II (a JV in Tokyo and San Francisco between Digital Garage and Daiwa Securities Group) an HU Investments (of New York, London and India). PurposeBuilt Ventures of San Francis also participated. You can read the press announcement here and their post on the round here.
As I recently wrote, the level of funding around privacy-preserving data empowerment businesses is paltry compared to the massive problems they help address – data privacy, security, trust, transparency, equitable participation in profits, etc. UBDI might be the first business built on a privacy by design data platform (digi.me) that has a simple, valuable enough value proposition for both consumers (monetize data at more than $1k annually in a few hours time) and businesses (improve quantitative and qualitative research results and make regulators happy) that I’ve seen.
It still takes about 10 minutes to set up, including downloading the separate digi.me app to protect and store the raw data, and the exact price points to get people to participate in studies needs to be worked out, but UBDI has an easy to use app that motivated consumers will have little problem navigating. And researchers of all kinds – market research, financial research, health research, academic research – will be blown away by what they find. Stay tuned for more announcements on the app coming out of beta.
Shane Green 