A founder recently asked me why I wouldn’t cover his marketplace startup in PreSeed Now.

I explained that marketplaces are typically such a straightforward model that they’re self-explanatory and don’t require a profile to be written about them for people to understand them.

And yet, while this is true, there are exceptions where I think to myself ‘most PreSeed Now readers will be interested in reading about this one in some depth’ And so today we bring you Opendatabay.

But first:

• Do you know a good B2B or deep tech startup based in the UK, anywhere from inception to raising Seed? If so, we want to know about them for a potential profile. As ever, drop me a line with your tip-offs, or even to pitch your own startup.

• Will you be at GP Bullhound’s Northern Tech Awards in Liverpool tonight? If so, stop me and say hi! Incidentally, the tech investment bank this week spun its VC fund out as a separate entity, Bullhound Capital.

– Martin

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Opendatabay wants to be the first place you go to buy or sell data

Whether its for training AI, product development, or conducting research, the world seems hungrier than ever for data.

The current case of authors being up in arms over Meta’s alleged use of a database of pirated books highlights just how important it is to find high-quality data you’re allowed to use.

Looking to do its bit to meet this need is Opendatabay, a new startup offering a marketplace to buy and sell sets of curated open data.

Founder Justinas Kairys pitches the startup as making data discovery and access “as seamless as shopping on Amazon.

“We are able to serve data in seconds, not in days or weeks, which is what's happening at the moment with current data marketplaces, which are very B2B enterprise orientated. They have long sales cycles, where you explain your problem, explain what kind of data set you need, and then they look through the list of data suppliers and so on. We’ve built an AI engine which can do this in seconds.”

The concept is really simple. If you’re a researcher putting together a report, you can quickly search for the data you need, buy it, and download it. Likewise, if you want to train AI on a particular topic, you can quickly pay for real or synthetic sets and start working with it.

Businesses can list their data for sale on Opendatabay, with the startup taking a cut of transactions. Wisely, the marketplace doesn’t host the data itself. This allows it to scale more cost-effectively and avoid responsibility for data security concerns.

That wouldn’t necessarily absolve Opendatabay if it offered data a third-party wasn’t authorised to sell in the first place. With this in mind, Kairys says all data providers and data sets are vetted before they go live.

In talking up his startup, Kairys puts particular emphasis on Opendatabay’s use of AI. This is primarily for data search, helping buyers find what they need.

“You can say ‘I'm building a AI model which helps to detect fake Amazon reviews, what kind of data set do I need?’ And before, there was a vendor on the phone saying ‘let me think, we have a company who has this type of data set, let me talk to them.’. Instead, our AI can say, have a look at this specific data set which has fake and real customer reviews.”

The story so far

By his own admission, Kairys dropped out of his computer science university after failing at programming. Undeterred, he ended up building a career as a software developer.

After working on a major blockchain project, he found himself working on increasingly large and high-profile projects. This led him to the pain point he’s now decided to solve (not with a blockchain, I should make clear!).

“I spent a lot of time trying to organise data on our end, or trying to get some sort of data to prove that our product works. I was talking to data vendors on the phone, trying to explain what we were looking for. I experienced the problem firsthand, and I thought something needed to be done.”

Kairys started work on an MVP for Opendatabay 11 months ago. Now he says it’s already generating revenue by listing data from a selection of providers across categories like healthcare, media audiences, and finance.

While Kairys is currently the sole full-time team member, he says he’s joined by a team of 13 volunteers working on Opendatabay:

“They believe in the company, and they are also tired and sick of the challenges they face in the data industry. They want to be the part of this revolution.”

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