Rita Personal Data, an Amsterdam-based data startup, announced that it has raised €1M in a pre-Seed round of funding led by Pitchdrive VC.
Angel investors, including Felix Van de Maele (co-founder of Collibra) and Hristo Borisov (co-founder of Payhawk), and other undisclosed angel investors, also participated.
The funding will enable it to expand the team, roll out its blockchain-based tech infrastructure and scale its user base.
John Arts and Guglielmo Schenardi, business graduates from Belgium and Italy respectively, founded Rita Personal Data in 2020 to give users ownership and control of their data.
The company aims to make data work for everyone by democratizing the data landscape. The startup has built a mobile app that allows people to view, understand and control their data.
Rita’s app allows users to track their data in a dashboard showing how much money the data is worth, how companies target them, which ads they have clicked on, and their level of data safety.
With the platform, users can ask companies to remove their data by exercising their GDPR rights.
The Dutch company is also planning to develop a trusted and ethical data marketplace, where users can view, control, and earn from their data.
Rita says companies would reward consumers for sharing their data instead of paying data brokers for unethical access to data with a chance of breaking consumer trust.
Currently, the startup employs six people from six different nationalities and has 55,000 active users. Existing advisors include top privacy and growth executives from Paypal, Amazon, BigID, and Microsoft.
Read more on Tech Gist Africa:
Juno raises $4 million to let you choose employee benefits
Helios raises €9 million to limit global warming
Soter Analytics raises $12 million in a Series A funding round