The Alabama Futures Fund has made an investment in an international company that will in turn enable it to bring its U.S. headquarters to Birmingham.
Datacy Inc., which is based in London and Dayton, Tennessee, is relocating its U.S. headquarters to Birmingham on the heels of the investment. Founder and CTO of datacy, Kaleb Wilson, will move from Tennessee to Birmingham.
Financial details of the funding were not released.
The company has developed a platform where business can purchase data and insights from online and mobile device app activity from participating consumers.
“The brokerage of consumer data is a massive market and the primary suppliers of that data, consumers, have never been paid. Datacy allows companies to buy incredibly high-quality data from willing participants,” said Matt Hottle, partner at Redhawk Advisory. “In turn, those consumers will be paid for sharing that data. This is going to fundamentally change how people view, protect and share their digital footprint."
According to the AFF, datacy’s vision is to change the paradigm in data collections and usage by ensuring privacy, control and visibility for consumers’ personal data through a simple platform. Enterprise data buyers subscribing to the datacy platform will receive ethically sourced and high-quality data sets while participating consumers will be paid for data they would otherwise have been giving away for free.
The company is aiming to create the first data marketplace that allows consumers to sell their data to third parties and receive cash payments for access to their user data. In addition to controlling what applications or websites collect a participating consumer’s information, datacy anonymizes users’ data to exclude names, email addresses and personal identifiers like social security and credit card numbers. Because this data is willingly provided by participating consumers, the data is far more valuable due to the volume, fidelity and detail of the shared data, which then helps marketers form a more accurate picture of their target market demographics.
This is the tenth investment for the AFF since its launch in 2018. AFF served as the lead investor on the round with participation from U.S. and international investors. Redhawk Advisory LLC serves as the investment manager of AFF and advised AFF on the datacy investment.
Datacy is headed by Paroma Indilo, who serves as founder and CEO. Indilo is a graduate of Warwick University Business School with an undergraduate degree in law and business. She is also a graduate of the London School of Economics with a master’s degree in law and finance. She supervised and regulated one of the largest investment banks in Europe while working at England’s Financial Services Authority. She then joined a top 20 international law firm where she practiced corporate, data protection and privacy law.
“We’re excited to work with AFF to give users more power and financial ownership over their data, and we can’t wait to show the world the incredible platform we’re building,” Indilo said. “We see a lot of opportunities to grow datacy in Birmingham and are excited to build great relationships throughout the city and its startup ecosystem.”
Wilson has been coding since the age of 10 and has a deep knowledge of data structures, operating algorithms and extensive experience building complex and scalable systems. Wilson is self-taught and built the datacy platform, including its back end. The platform’s back end includes datacy’s proprietary microservices architecture and private blockchain.
