Our Founder / CEO and our history
Professor Dr Irene Ng
“Our data is our behavior. By owning and having the choice to use our data, we keep the markets for data free; which would emerge a world where our behaviours can also be free.”
At the beginning…
In May 2013, a group of academics from six universities and diverse disciplines – economics, computing, operations management, strategy, design informatics – came together at Warwick University. They were meeting about their £1.2 million UK-government-funded project, whose purpose was to engineer and design a multi-sided market for personal data – one where an individual's data would be owned by the individual. This project was dubbed "The HAT" (Hub-of-All-Things), and the Principle Investigator of the project was our founder and CEO, Professor Dr Irene Ng.
History of Dataswyft
Irene was the technology and market design architect from research to commercialisation. As a market design economist, she saw the market failure for data from as early as 2011 and she set about creating the HAT Microserver and the data infrastructure that would correct the market.
May 2013 – Nov 2015: HAT Research Project
It took 2.5 years to get the HAT from concept to reality. An Industry Advisory Board was created to help solidify thinking on the HAT economic and market models. "Mad Hatters' Tea Parties" and HAT Meetups were held to engage with developers, industry and policymakers. Countless presentations were made at academic conferences and industry events to inspire a community of personal data advocates.
In July 2014, the HAT project created its first database schema and released it to the public domain. By the time the HAT project ended in November 2015, the Alpha HAT Microserver was ready, along with 6 briefing papers on how the network should be designed and built.
Nov 2015 – Aug 2019: HATDeX and HATCF
The "HAT Foundation" – the collective name comprising of Dataswyft and the HAT Community Foundation (HCF) – was officially launched in February 2016 at an event at The Shard in London, where a HAT platform capable of collecting, controlling, re-combining, contextualizing and sharing personal data was unveiled. The HAT code was then open-sourced.
The job of globally rolling out HAT Microservers went to Dataswyft Ltd, which held the software IP for the transaction engine and the deployment of HAT Microservers in the cloud. At the same time, the HCF was tasked with regulating the transaction ecosystem. Over the following three years, the technology system continued to be developed, along with the legal and economic model. Irene was the lead architect for data portability between the HATs which she translated into techno-legal protocols used by Dataswyft Data Wallets.
Sep 2019: Dataswyft
Dataswyft secured a £1.8m seed round raise in September 2019, led by IQ Capital with participation from Pacific & Orient Properties Ltd, Alphanumeric Corporation and Delin Ventures.
Jan 2025: Patent Issued in the US.
In Jan 2025, the patent for the provisioning of HAT Microservers was issued in the US.
Today, the Dataswyft Network is growing, rolling out Data Ecosystems in multiple countries. Our academic partners continue to lead in this space on digital transformation, innovation, and impact with more than $50m in research grants.
OUR TECHNOLOGY HAS BEEN FEATURED IN THESE PUBLICATIONS
