Building a Better Internet
Meet the second Betalab cohort
On March 5, 2020, we announced a new investment program called Betalab: Fix The Internet.
Our information ecosystem was collapsing, and social media was fragmenting, polarizing, and feeding different “truths” to us. By January 2021, we no longer needed to speculate about the real world consequences of continuing on that path.
Yet, we knew that entrepreneurs were out there, working to build a new path forward and we hoped to accelerate that development. We are seeing the building blocks to a better internet emerge: decentralization, privacy-preserving tech (and a bit of privacy regulation), advancements in machine learning (particularly NLU) are all key elements. So are shifting norms, and widespread awareness that social media just isn’t working for society as intended.
And we have hundreds of other reasons to be optimistic! Hundreds of start-ups applied to participate in Betalab, covering a broad range of solutions: novel approaches to de-biasing news, combatting disinformation, rethinking the incentive models for social media, reconsidering data usage and ownership, and putting more power into the hands of creators (aka the Creator Economy). We mapped the landscape toward the end of last year, including our first Betalab investment cohort made up of Synthetaic, Nth Party, International Persuasion Machines and Savepoint.
Our second Betalab cohort kicked off last month and we have three incredible teams building products for the knowledge economy, art on the blockchain, and data privacy.
Blockchain.art: BCA makes blockchain technology easily accessible to all participants in the art world, helping to sustainably grow a secure digital art market. Designed for art world professionals by art world professionals, BCA makes listing, buying, selling and managing digital artworks intuitive, providing a user-friendly interface that connects to the blockchain and seamlessly integrates with partners’ websites.
Readocracy: Readocracy makes all the content you consume count. Unlock private insights, like a Fitbit for your information diet, and a knowledge profile that lets you showcase your life’s learning — quantified and verified — while earning you badges, certificates, and access to informed, troll-free discussions. Creating a future where information wellness matters.
Rownd: Rownd is a SaaS Personal Data Trust and Privacy Platform that enables businesses to reduce risk and costs around personal data storage and management while empowering end users with the ability to revoke consent to key information. Rownd safely and securely stores PII and integrates with existing datastores, enables developers to quickly deploy world-class personal data protection and management in minutes with our API and front-end tools, and allows end-users and consumers to quickly claim and manage their data.
While the Betalab program will formally wrap up in August, Betaworks Ventures remains very interested in the areas we’ve covered over the past 18 months. If you are an entrepreneur building in this space, we want to hear from you!
