Former Partner at Apollo Global Management LLC and HATDeX Announce New £30m Partnership Agreement

HAT Infrastructure Platform will buy HATs, grow infrastructure, and improve digital innovation in a decentralised personal data economy

CAMBRIDGE, UK | HAT Data Exchange Ltd (HATDeX) and Tolga Uzuner, global technology investor and former Partner at Apollo Global Management LLC, are pleased to announce the HAT Infrastructure Platform (HIP), a £30m planned commitment to fund at least 10m new HAT microservers, provisioning them for new apps and services, growing the technology infrastructure, and improving innovation in the decentralised data economy now through 2020.

HATDeX, a tech company, is the operator of the Hub of All Things (HAT) microserver and creator of a platform technology for the decentralised data economy.

As the tech industry moves to new information policies after the Facebook and Cambridge Analytica scandals, person-owned first party personal data is increasingly a better way of building apps and services. HAT microservers are owned by the individual and can collect and store data for them wherever it’s created, unlocking opportunities in private AI, non-intrusive online advertising, and improved insights HATs improve companies’ access to their users’ data too, giving them direct, real-time, on-demand, dynamic information that doesn’t violate customer expectations or intrude upon their privacy. Analogous to the bank account, the HAT microserver is a data account that can be provided to individuals by governments, hospitals, financial services, or technology providers, and each HAT can be used by an individual to reuse and re-share app data, increasing their power, control, and collective worth as a consumer.

The HIP is a newly-formed entity that will commit £30m investment ($42.78m USD) to create 10m premium HATs for its partners and clients. It is tasked with creating a digital infrastructure for the decentralised personal data economy, building the foundational layer of the burgeoning new resource of personal data that is owned by the individual. The HIP will further contribute to both HAT-enabled apps and private AI, and the server and the computing infrastructure to keep them competitive. It will form a part of the HAT Accelerator, a global technology accelerator due to launch in July 2018, pursuing a global vision of becoming the leading global strategic investor in this most valuable asset.

The personal data economy is worth billions, despite the customer friction and the regulatory, ethical, and security expenses that come with personal data use. Today, when companies own users’ personal information, it becomes difficult to share, update, understand, and benefit from. The HIP will help create technology that instead begins to centralize that data around the technology end-user; the citizen. Data that’s decentralized like this will become the world’s most valuable digital resource. When end-users are able to combine different types of data, new services will be created, which will be the key to next-generation technologies like personalised products, preventative and on-demand medicine, sophisticated machine learning algorithms, and pervasive IoT.

Says Dr Uzuner, “The data economy is an emerging digital economy. Digital services from fintech to health are lacking a crucial piece of infrastructure for personal data in the form of the HAT microserver. With it, they can benefit from better coordination and real-time recommendations, and they can create services using data they’ve never had access to before. Augmented intelligence especially, a combination of personal data and machine learning algorithms that private to the individual, will finally be a possibility with this technology, which I consider to be the future of the innovation economy.”

Dr Andrius Aucinas, CEO of HATDeX, sees the HAT Infrastructure Platform as an affirmation of the company’s vision for a new, decentralised personal data economy. “The HAT re-captures the original economic vision of the Internet,” he said. “Individuals cannot fully realise the value of new personalised services today, so constrained are they by the limitations of a technology ecosystem where all of our data is held by apps and technology giants. The HAT lets innovation thrive, empowering small app makers, SMEs, and organisations around the world to access personal data by just asking for it directly from their customers. HATs give individuals a chance to take back the control and the economic power that comes from the Internet, but in a way that creates value and opportunity for everyone.”

 

About Tolga Uzuner

Tolga Uzuner was with Apollo Global Management from 2013 to April 2018. Prior to that time, Dr. Uzuner was a Managing Director in the Chief Investment Office at JPMorganChase. Prior to that, Dr. Uzuner was a Director in the Fixed Income Group at Credit Suisse. Dr. Uzuner previously served on the boards of directors of Capital IQ, Consul, IP Unity, Ipanema, and Atoga. Dr. Uzuner graduated from MIT with a BS in Computer Science and Engineering, and a BS in Economics. He received a Master of Science in Finance from London Business School and received his PhD from the Computer Laboratory at the University of Cambridge. He is a Fellow of Kings College.

 

About HATDeX

HAT Data Exchange Ltd (HATDeX) is a commercial enterprise spun out from the RCUK £1.2m HAT research project (2013-2015) tasked to build the decentralised HAT Platform from the HAT open sourced core. From 2015-17, HATDeX built a suite of products (the HATDeX Technology Suite) to assist organisations in benefiting from decentralise personal data storage, processing exchange and AI by giving their own customers HAT personal microservers. HATDeX is part of the HAT ecosystem managed by the HAT Community Foundation. To date, more than £10m HAT-related grants have been awarded to HAT partner universities.

 

For more information about the HAT visit https://hubofallthings.com

For more information about the HAT Data Exchange visit https://hatdex.org

 

For more information, please contact:

Jonathan Holtby

Community Manager, HATDeX

[email protected]

+44 (0) 7508 080295