XSeed Capital is very excited to announce our investment in Narrative, a platform that enables buyers and sellers of raw data events to come together and transact.
As more people, more companies, and more devices connect over the Internet, the engagement and interactions of those constituents creates overwhelming amounts of data. At the same time, organizations are deploying more advanced techniques for leveraging ever-growing data sets to build more intelligence into their products and applications. The primary challenge to this is that the creators of the products and applications are often not the creators of the specific data that are most valuable to their research. To date, this problem has been solved through expensive and elongated business development efforts or by procuring aggregated data sets from brokers which ultimately leads to pricing inefficiencies. Buyers need to sift through huge data sets to find the most valuable raw data assets, and sellers struggle to be discovered and lack competitive sales processes; therefore sellers fail to optimize pricing since they don’t necessarily connect with the most interested buyers. We believe these dynamics naturally drive towards a liquid marketplace, an evolution that has occurred in financial, content, advertising and now data markets.
Narrative’s vision is to facilitate and accelerate this evolution and to create transparency, enable control and ultimately increase the value of all data that enterprises currently exchange. The platform offers a single point of integration for enterprises, reducing engineering burden on the participants while opening up access to liquidity and increasing visibility on data transfer and value creation. By providing tools and a marketplace, Narrative is making existing processes more efficient and valuable and opening up monetization opportunities for market participants that have been prohibited by cost or have gone undiscovered to date. This is a massive bet on a market and we feel comfortable in large part because of the people at the helm.
We have had the privilege of knowing and at times working alongside CEO and Co-Founder Nick Jordan for over a decade. He has continuously worked for companies and teams at the forefront of identifying and using data to create value: Yahoo!, Demdex, and Tapad. He started articulating the Narrative vision to us nearly 18 months ago and we are honored to have supported him as he validated the market and product needs over the past year. When we met President and Co-Founder Bryan Everett last summer, we quickly appreciated the level of experience he has in building out sales and marketing teams steeped in data and monetization. Building a marketplace is no small task, and his experience will be critical to establishing customer relationships and delivering on the mission.
Customers and press are taking notice and we know there is much, much more to this story. We couldn’t be more excited to join Nick, Bryan and the Narrative team on this ride!