Birmingham, Alabama, May 26, 2021 – Alabama Futures Fund (“AFF”) recently placed an investment in datacy, Inc., (“datacy”). Based in London, England and Dayton, TN and relocating its US headquarters to Birmingham, AL, datacy has developed a platform where businesses can buy online and mobile device application (“app”) activity and insights data collected directly from participating consumers. datacy’s vision is to change the paradigm in data collection and usage by ensuring consumers’ privacy, control and visibility into their personal data through a simple, user-friendly 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.
This represents the tenth investment from AFF since the AFF was launched in Q4 of 2018. Like previous investments in companies located outside the State of Alabama, datacy will move its headquarters to Birmingham and Founder/CTO, Kaleb Wilson, will move from Dayton to Birmingham. AFF served as the lead investor on the round with participation from US and international investors.
Redhawk Advisory, LLC (“Redhawk”) serves as the investment manager of AFF and advised AFF on the datacy investment. Paroma Indilo (Founder and CEO) and Kaleb Wilson (Founder and CTO) bring a unique blend of talent and experience. 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.
Wilson has been coding since the age of 10 and has a deep grasp of data structures, operating algorithms and extensive experience building complex, robust and scalable systems. Kaleb is self-taught and built the datacy platform, including its resilient and scalable backend. The platform’s backend includes datacy’s proprietary microservices architecture and private blockchain.
datacy is creating 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 because of the sheer volume, fidelity and detail of the shared data, which then helps marketers form a more accurate picture of their target market demographics.
According to Ms. Indilo, “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. We see a lot of opportunities to grow datacy in Birmingham and are excited to build great relationships throughout the city and its start-up ecosystem.”
Matt Hottle, Partner at Redhawk said, “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. 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.”
