Evolving the Market for Personal Data
Highlights of a journey from research project to tech start-up
On a sunny May day in 2013, a group of academics got together at Warwick University. They came from six universities and diverse disciplines: economics, computing, operations management, strategy, design informatics. They were meeting to discuss their new £1.2 million UK-government-funded project: how to engineer and design a multi-sided market for personal data. The HAT (Hub of all Things).
May 2013-Nov 2015: HAT Research Project
It took two and a half years to get from concept to reality. Work began on building the HAT platform. Homes were wired with sensors to learn behaviours. An Internet toilet roll holder and a ‘magic’ beauty box were created to send data to the Internet, so researchers could gain insight into consumption patterns. An Industry Advisory Board was set up, to help solidify thinking on the HAT economic and market model. Mad Hatters’ Tea Parties and HAT Meetups were held to engage with developers, industry and policymakers. Countless presentations made at academic conferences and industry events to inspire a community of personal data advocates.
Data innovation for the future. Paradigm shift. Visionary. Exciting.
These were some of the words used to define the HAT, from participants at the first Mad Hatters’ Tea Party in July 2014 when the beta HAT — a database schema — was released to the public domain. By the time the HAT project ended in November 2015, the Alpha HAT was ready. So were the elements deemed necessary to build a market for personal data, including an ecosystem and a code of practice.
While research continued on the HAT through additional grant funding, scaling up the HAT commercially would require a different set-up. Enter the next phase: social entrepreneurship.
Nov 2015-Aug 2019: HATDeX and HAT Community Foundation
The HAT Foundation — comprising the HAT Data Exchange Ltd (HATDeX) and the HAT Community Foundation (HCF) — was officially launched on a cold February evening in 2016. At the event at London’s Shard building, a HAT platform capable of collecting, controlling, re-combining, contextualising and sharing personal data was unveiled to those present.
The job of globally rolling out HATs went to HATDeX, which now held the software IP for the open-source HAT, while the HCF was tasked with regulating the HAT ecosystem and helping emerge a personal data market.
Over the next three years, the technology services around the HAT continued to be developed, along with the legal and economic model. The first HAT personal data accounts (PDAs) were deployed, and the first HAT merchant partner began building on the platform.
But it wasn’t just about developing the tech and the markets.
A social movement was launched to convert mindsets focused on the battle for privacy, to fighting for economic power with our data instead. MadHATTERS weekly was introduced in Dec 2016, with the aim of building a community around this fight. HATDeX founders, who were part of the original HAT research team, kept the discussion on personal data rights in the news, as well as in consultations with policymakers. Debate on issues concerning personal data and the digital economy continued through the annual Wolfson-HAT Digital Person Symposium.
Much effort was also put into raising funds for the HAT’s scale-up. There were several difficult rounds of crowdfunding and a private raise before months of pitching finally led to HATDeX securing £1.6 million in seed funding in August 2019.
Sept 2019: Dataswift
The raise represents a new chapter for HATDeX, beginning with a name change to Dataswift to reflect its new focus on being a solutions provider.
With the current seed funding round, led by IQ Capital with participation from Pacific & Orient Properties Ltd and Alphanumeric Corporation, Dataswift aims to grow its personal data infrastructure globally. But it is also looking to develop in new areas, such as using Edge analytics and private AI to create a new market where users’ PDAs privately generate algorithms and better insights, hence making their data more valuable.
Dataswift will focus on solutions that help apps and websites upgrade their company-held user accounts to HAT PDAs, to enable companies to give user information back to their users. Such personal data will be stored on user-owned infrastructure instead of on companies’ corporate servers.
The HAT platform currently has 4,000 users, with 23 applications in testing, and 2 live applications. And with HAT Microservers receiving Financial Conduct Authority approval to hold consumer finance data, Dataswift expects to further grow the ecosystem of 10 universities and 30 partners it has built over the past six years.
As the first organisation to fully resolve the technical, legal, and commercial barriers to personal data mobility, Dataswift believes the PDA will be essential infrastructure in everyone’s lives, as necessary as an email address or a mobile number. It is now looking to scale up the platform to reach 100,000 HAT users and 100 apps in 12–16 months, a target that will set it up for the next stage: a series A raise.
