Our Investment In Delphia

Photo by Chris Liverani on Unsplash

For the last decade, there’s been a burgeoning market for buying and selling personal data. The beneficiaries seem to include everyone — from the DMV to your telco, to disinformation campaigners — everyone that is, except you. As the author of your data, we believe that you should see the benefit from the value you create.

Today, we’re excited to announce the launch of Delphia, a company whose mission is to help people capture value from their data in addition to providing access to financial markets. They allow consumers to invest their data (and their money) into the stock market. The goal is to democratize access to top-performing investment products for everyone — including those without the capital to invest.

There are three components to make this work:

1. The data that people share with Delphia creates an investment advantage
2. This investment advantage attracts capital
3. The people investing capital pay a Redistribution Fee to those investing data

The company is rooted in the academic research of Dr. Clifton van der Linden who’s lab achieved significant breakthroughs in election forecasting by studying the intersection of quantitative social science and Big Data. Delphia is now applying this same methodology to capital markets by forecasting company fundamentals, like sales. By joining a deeper understanding of the individual, to their behavioral patterns in the world, Delphia can see trends taking shape in the population (data) before others catch on. To create full alignment in their business model, Delphia became a Registered Investment Adviser (RIA) so that those investing their data would also be the sole customer.

Golden Ventures led the pre-seed round back in February 2018, and we are pleased to welcome our new partners in the latest financing. The founding team is a mix of operators and academics that we’ve known for several years before investing, including:

• Andrew Peek, CEO (co-founder of Jet Cooper, acquired by Shopify),
• Cameron Westland, CTO (co-founder of Kera Software, acquired by Autodesk)
• Dr. Clifton van der Linden, Chief Scientist (founder of VoxPop Labs).

From our fund’s perspective, the following trends led us to believe the timing for this product was right:

1. The public’s awareness of behavioral surplus, surveillance capitalism, and how the biggest consumer platforms are generating billions in profits off consumer data and data exhaust.
2. The increasing use of quantitative strategies and the rising popularity of alternative data set acquisition by fund managers ($1.7B projected spend in 2020)
3. The growing advantage that platforms (Facebook, Google) and those who can afford to pay (hedge funds, private wealth managers) have when it comes to acquiring data vs. those who don’t.
4. The potential for significant data dividends, where everyday consumers can share in the wealth created from their data

In a world where the incumbents thrive off information asymmetry and propriety access to data, Delphia hopes to unite consumers in building a sustainable investment advantage that will attract global capital. In doing so, Delphia will provide financial inclusion to those who hold data as one of their only assets to invest.

Find out how much your data is worth and get onto the waitlist early.