Make money from your data with Gener8

Gener8, a London based company that lets people take back control and earn from their online data has raised £5.1m in funding as it looks to accelerate growth and expand operations.

This latest funding round values the company at £30m and was led by West Indies, Chris Gayle, Simon Clegg CBE, Shane Ryan, and Tony Ryan. In 2021, the company featured on the BBC’s Dragons Den, with a standout pitch attracting £60k funding from Dragons Peter Jones and Touker Suleyman for a combined 10% equity in the business (plus some free office space from Touker). Other investors include another Dragon, Tej Lalvani, musician Tinie Tempah and football manager, Harry Redknapp.

Gener8 was founded in 2018 by entrepreneur Sam Jones, who before creating the business was global brand manager at Red Bull. Gener8 works by allowing users to see what data a company holds on them, and then gives them the choice to earn from it themselves. The browser lets people choose to keep their data private or earn from it themselves whilst browsing online. By selecting ‘Privacy Mode’ the user can stop companies from tracking them, or the ‘Rewards Mode’ means that a person can share their data with Gener8 to monetise it for them. Initially it worked only through browser extensions such as Chrome, but the company has now released a mobile app for Apple and Android devices.

People receive points in return for sharing their data with Gener8. These points can be redeemed for products, vouchers or donations to charity in the marketplace. The average person earns between £5 – £25 in rewards per month, with thousands of pounds being donated to charities which are changed on a monthly basis.

In a heavily data driven world, we are all aware our data is tracked and exploited for a myriad of uses, but knowing who and where is another story. Centralising such access and gaining a financial benefit seems like a great idea. Of course, this topic does raise the question on what data should companies be allowed to exploit, and if further regulation is required to control such access, especially as the growth in IoT devices further accelerates data collection in areas such as biometrics, health and geographic location.

Posted by: Simon Baxter at 09:10

Tags: data  

Add a comment