The problem

While there is an abundance of data for big tech companies, this isn't the same story for SMEs. First party data is poor, meaning businesses see a small fraction of their consumers’ journey. All this ultimately puts them at a strong disadvantage—it’s estimated that poor data and insights costs businesses between $9-15 million a year. 

There is a huge opportunity here. Around 43ZB (1ZB is a trillion GB) of data sits idle across private companies, organisations, financial institutions, and payment platforms, around 1000 times more than that of all the Big Tech companies combined. 

Making this data accessible would unleash an ocean of knowledge that could dramatically enrich SMEs first-party data, truly levelling the playing field.

The solution

Fantix is building the first Federated Knowledge Engine (FKE), aimed at allowing companies to answer critical questions about their customers without exchanging any data. 

Its system is designed to leverage the collective intelligence of multiple AI models, helping business analyse, integrate, and derive insights from vast amounts of data across multiple sources. Rather than competing, the system creates a collaborative environment where all AI models work together, gaining insights that are beyond the reach of any single model.

Here’s an example to illustrate how this might work—a collaboration between a bank and a retail train. The bank wants to improve its credit risk models, while the retail chain wants to better understand customer buying patterns. With Fantix's platform, the bank and retail chain can collaborate on a machine learning model that predicts credit risk based on customer purchasing behaviour. The retail chain trains the model on its own data and shares only the model parameters with the bank, ensuring data privacy. The bank can then use this model to make better lending decisions while keeping customer data secure.

Fantix has shown promising early traction, as well as notable interest from investors, closing a $1.6 million seed round with investment from Gaingels, Notion Capital, and Connect Ventures.

Why we’re excited to invest

Edoardo Gentili, investor at Founders Factory, says: “Federated AI is a rapidly growing market. Simultaneously, the problem of managing first party data is becoming more critical, given increasing privacy concerns and regulations. The timing for Fantix AI's entry into the market is ideal, due to the increasing demand for privacy-preserving machine learning solutions, growing public awareness and regulation, and the emphasis on first-party data and privacy-enhancing technologies. With deep domain expertise in big data and AI, the Fantix team is well-positioned to capture this growing market—already evident in their recent seed round attracting investment from several leading investors.”