Rainfall: On a mission to unlock financial value
Rainfall. Reimagining how we value human life, from the everyday moms looking to stay connected with family, to digital natives creating social media content, to the more venerable refugees living in camps outside of war-torn lands.
We do this by creating value from the data each of them generates, responsibly and in a privacy preserving manner – while delivering that value back to them.
We think of it as the new central nervous system for a reimagined, sustainable, and responsible economy, instead of this fragile, broken one we have today.
The old, built on the scarcity of resources – oil, metals, land; replaced by the abundance of the new digital ones – that represent the intrinsic value of every connected human life, measured in every activity that we do, in the form of data. Data that has been extractively used and monetized by the large tech monopolies, we call GAFABAT (Google Apple Facebook Amazon Baidu Alibaba Tencent & Tesla).
By 2025, it’s estimated that 463 exabytes (that’s almost 500 billion gigabytes!) of data will be created each day globally. Over a year, that is the equivalent of 170 trillion gigabytes of data that we will generate in the next 6 years itself. Add the 50 billion connected devices we will use by next year itself, and that number looks more like 600 zettabytes (equal to 600 trillion gigabytes) by 2020. This is a lot of data, to say the least.
The biggest beneficiary of this data explosion – the incredible, yet scary evolution of AI – has now become an intrinsic part of the daily fabric of our lives. And as impressive as this AI powered data boom may seem, those fundamental issues of Privacy, Decentralization and Economic Agency have far-reaching consequences that arise from it.
In this new reality, the zettabytes of data we create must be treated like the new oil – our oil. The economic imperative for this massive amount of data that we generate to be owned and monetised by us is more critical than ever before.
The idea, and effort, of monetising user data is not exactly new. Simplistic data marketplaces (even the new DataDAOs) and basic efforts at selling user data have tried to tap into this digital resource and failed.
Why is this?
- Raw data has very little value by itself, which is why GAFABAT contextualize large swathes of user data with their cloud-based AI, through different business models. Google sells AdWords, Facebook monetizes its Identity Graph and Amazon tailor’s ecommerce from all this knowledge. None of them take raw data and sell it on some marketplaces.
- Negotiating its sale each time involves too much friction, from seller and buyer. (Imagine arguing back-and-forth over cents and kilobytes?)
This is where Rainfall is different. Significantly.
Rainfall uses advanced cognitive edge-based AI to transform raw data into Real-Time Social IntelligenceTM (RSI) that is of high monetary value to individuals, organisations, businesses, and governments and automates the entire process of valuing, monetising and compensating all participants in the value chain, in particular the original data creators.
Instead of selling data, Rainfall creates rich context form that data – like telling the detailed story from millions of data events as they happen, without revealing Personally Identifiable Information (PII) of the creators. As an example, the data events from 200 people attending an event at the Arts Club in Central London from 11am until 2pm might create time-critical intelligence for businesses down the road about the opportunity to offer Coffee promotions to a subset of those people likely to walk past the business a few minutes after the event ends, on their way to the train station.
Creating economic agency of one’s data could not be more critical than at any time prior. Rainfall aims to create a meaningful recurring income for billions of people around the world. The first effort to achieve this is the ‘Rainfall for Moms’ program launched in partnership with Joy of Mom, a global community of three million moms committed to the social, financial and emotional upliftment and impact for mothers everywhere.
“Our mission to empower moms around the world is further enhanced by Rainfall,” said Vicki Reece, founder, and CEO of Joy of Mom, “we moms generate more data than ever – it’s time we get compensated for it, and on our terms.”
As the first privacy-by-design decentralised data monetisation platform, Rainfall announced a $1m seed investment round led by Charly Kleissner, co-founder Toniic, Katapult Foundation, D3Jubilee, Brigitte Mohn of the Bertelsmann Foundation, and other renown impact investors. The funding has already accelerated efforts to expand the partnership programs, scale the technology platform, and further build out the team.
The Company announced the launch of a new Staking Round this week that will bring in another $6.5 million to grow partnerships and bring long-term strategic partners to the Rainfall ecosystem.
Established in 2020, headquartered in Zug, Switzerland, with a global team that possesses deep transformative technology and consumer software experience, Rainfall is on a mission to unlock the financial value of the next billion.
To learn more, visit www.rainfall.one
By Amit Pradhan.