On Monday 28th February, we hosted our first Monthly Update Live AMA on YouTube. Our goal moving forward is to come together with our community on a monthly basis to give an overview of what’s been happening at DataUnion as well as sharing what we are focusing on.

We’ve had a busy start to 2022, and there’s been so much going on that it’s sometimes easy to stay focused on the work and not take a moment to look back, review and share with everyone what’s been happening.

So in the true spirit of our aim to build this future data ecosystem with the help, support and guidance of our community, we’re also committing to sharing more and inviting you to be a part of this journey alongside us.

Without further ado, here’s a quick roundup of our first Monthly Update.

A Quick Introduction to DataUnion

It would be foolish of us not to take a moment to welcome those that are new to our community, or that have just found our project in the live sessions. And the same applies to this article.

DataUnion is building a DataUnions-as-a-Service platform to create unions that produce AI-ready data and co-owned insights. What that means, in essence, is that we want to facilitate organisations, companies and individuals to come together as a DataUnion to create, annotate and verify data sets, making them AI-ready, whilst sharing the value created as a result.

Data is often referred to as the new “oil” in the economy. The issues around centralized data have been the subject of many heated debates, with big technology companies such as Google and Facebook coming under fire. When it comes to AI, data sets are often resource intensive projects. The process of creating, annotating and verifying data can be long and expensive, and more often than not, once the data is used once, it’s forgotten about.

DataUnion offers a new way to encourage collaboration and crowd-source data, annotation and verification. All whilst creating a democratized ecosystem that shares the value created from data and insights.

Fundraising Status

Although we can’t disclose all the information, yet, we are thrilled to announce that our seed investment round is currently in progress and will be closing soon. This next phase in our journey has helped us transition from an Ocean Protocol grant project to a funded business model.

The seed round we’re raising is to help us grow the team and continue to build our DataUnion-as-a-service platform.

We’ll be sharing more information about the raise once it has closed.

The DataUnion Ecosystem Is Growing

From health to nature, there isn’t a sector that can’t benefit from a DataUnion, and so far this year, we’ve been engaging and communicating with projects across the globe looking at new and innovative ways to collect, annotate & verify data.

These ongoing conversations reinforce our vision for what the future data ecosystem can look like, and we’re excited to continue developing our partnerships with like-minded organisations.

Our participation in the Sovereign Nature Initiative’s Winter Hackathon was another great environment to build these relationships. When we started the event, we had 2 partners that we were working closely with on our NatureUnion. By the end of the weekend we had 5 times as many organisations wanting to be a part of the project.