Meet YoloData, one of the latest DMV-area data analytics startups promising to make sense of millennials for businesses.
The Ashburn, Va.-based startup provides data scientists and business developers with an aggregated data platform focused on how millennials might respond to a business. Co-founder and CEO Bryan Short said the platform collects financial and health data, mostly, from public government sources and a few private partnerships, but it also lets customers import their own private data for individual analysis.
In January, the nine-month-old company will close its first round of $500,000 backed mostly by local angel investors who have previously invested in Short's previous ventures, including a few mobile apps. This raise will be used to prep YoloData's technology for beta testing in the spring.
Short says they have a variety of customers, spanning from South Africa-based telecom provider MTN to Chantilly, Va.-based mobile app company Verco Apps, and they have their eyes set on a Latin America expansion with interest from companies in Puerto Rico.
"There are competitors that provide simple social media aggregation of data," Short said. "But what we did was take it a step further, and we normalize and simplify it, and then apply deep learning, machine learning and artificial intelligence, so the marketing people don't have to be analyzing data all day long."
YoloData has a pretty similar model as the newly launched Solebrity Analytics, the enterprise arm of social shopping app Solebrity that now sells its data about millennial shoppers to other businesses. So, of course, Solebrity CEO and co-founder AJ Jaghori also serves on YoloData's adviser and chairman.
YoloData is a relatively small team with just four people, and it's definitely not the first company in the DMV to promise to help people understand industry data. Along with the recent launch of Solebrity Analytics, the DMV has seen the emergence of companies like D.C.-based ICX Media, which helps online creators track how well their video and social creations perform online and closed a $2.5 million seed round in March.
"If you can't keep up with the millennial generation and understand them, then you're going to be left behind," Short said.
Image used via CCO Public Domain — credit StockSnap
