By Shilpa Kumar, Subhashish Bhadra and Raahil Rai
Data was the new oil. Over the last decade, some of the world's most valuable companies were built on refining data. As recently as 2008, only one tech business found a spot among the world's five most valuable companies. Today, the list consists exclusively of tech companies.
In the future, data will increasingly become like electricity -more and more businesses will digitize operations to better serve customers- sales, marketing, administration, and customer service- and will, in many cases, morph into being tech businesses, by digitising the product or service itself.
Venture capital is flooding into technologies of the future, which will generate still more data. For example, VCs poured $5.1 billion into the IoT sector in the first half of 2020 alone. The data this digitisation generates will underpin all business decisions.
Like oil extraction, data extraction has its own inconvenient truth. The CO2-like data exhaust from our digital economy harms us individually and as a society by compromising our privacy and ultimately our agency and safety in our increasingly online lives. The world isn't waiting on regulations, policies, and ESG-like standards alone to address climate change. Active and informed citizens make better decisions at an individual level, and seek better practices from organisations. And CleanTech enables businesses and individuals to reduce their carbon footprint on an industrial scale.
Like CleanTech, impact-driven entrepreneurs and investors are now looking to PrivacyTech that enables a more sustainable digital economy, and ultimately, a safer and more empowering digital society. In this PrivacyTech thesis, we posit that PrivacyTech offers VCs financial returns and outsized impact opportunities.
Please do read the PrivacyTech thesis below or download it as a PDF here
