Is New Chapter

Dataswift’s successful seed funding marks next stage of the HAT. The MadHATTERS Editorial, 25 September 2019

MadHATTERs Weekly
Like what you read? Subscribe here.

Last week, Dataswift announced its successful seed funding of £1.6 million. Led by IQ Capital with participation from Pacific & Orient Properties Ltd and Alphanumeric Corporation, the raise will allow Dataswift to do several things: grow personal data innovation globally and establish a new standard for building apps and website on user infrastructure, but also develop its capabilities in new areas like private AI.

Dataswift’s solutions help apps and websites upgrade their company-held user accounts to HAT Personal Data Accounts, so that the data of their users are stored on the user side, with movement of data between the app and the user data account based on a legal contract of usage, purpose and duration.

The journey from research project to tech start-up and successful seed funding has been a long and arduous one, as Dataswift CEO Irene Ng reflects (#seedfunding, amirite? — ed). But it is filled with many highlights: I captured some of them in a quick analysis of the HAT’s journey. Several words have stood out — those used to define the HAT research project in what seems like a lifetime ago, at the first Mad Hatters’ Tea Party (in fact it was only 2014). That was the day the beta HAT platform was first released to the public domain.

Data innovation for the future. Paradigm shift. Visionary. Exciting.

These are the words we use to stay focused, and they bode well for the future. Dataswift continues to traverse a path set by a small group of academics one sunny May day in 2013.

With the raise, the teams officially split (sob) — those staying in research stay behind in HATLAB doing cool R&D stuff on HATs and with HATs. And those in Dataswift doing the also cool stuff of scaling and growing globally. Who’s more awesome. We’ll always come together for the bbq of course.

MadHATTERs is a weekly newsletter covering technology, personal data, and the Internet. Its perspective championing decentralised personal data is led by Dataswift with the Hub of All Things (HAT) technology. If you like what you read, subscribe to receive MadHATTERs in your inbox. Find out more about the HAT at www.hubofallthings.com