Meet the team that is giving people control of their data

Profila is a new customer data, engagement & marketing platform which is forging a new era toward Decentralized Marketing (DeMar) platforms built on blockchain & privacy preserving technologies. The app has been receiving attention and support from the Cardano community, but who is the team behind the product and what makes them well placed to effectively tackle this ambitious challenge? 

Swiss tech startup Profila built a new-era data, customer engagement and digital marketing platform that offers consumers complete control over their personal data, and compensation for sharing it with brands through their app. Over 20 people with experience in privacy law, big data, online advertising & AdTech, and blockchain technology have been working since 2017 to bring back control over data to people.

The crypto startup has already been recognized and sponsored by the Swiss government innovation agency (Innosuisse), also closing several research projects and university partnerships with industry experts in the privacy and AdTech industry. Their idea is to benefit both people and brands by providing users with more control over the data they are sharing with companies. In turn, brands receive more accurate feedback and direct insights from each individual, which enable them to provide each customer with a more personalized experience.

The idea that started everything

Profila’s idea stemmed from Shawn Jensen who was leading the cloud applications department of a global Telco in South Africa where one of his projects introduced Google enterprise search into the local market. The power of this technically beautiful yet fundamentally frightening technology motivated Shawn to ask the question, how can a person manage and protect their own data and get value from it when enterprises have such power and access to it already.

The idea was first pitched to investors in 2007 as mycentralrecord.com, the concept of a vault, storing personal and preference data, was new, however, smartphone adoption was still in focus and companies were not ready for such a new person-centric platform. Profila (Profile Alpha, your one profile) was formed in 2015, and in 2016 Shawn developed a privacy rights assertion platform for companies to make it simpler for their customers to manage their data and their privacy rights.

The founders and the team that boosted Profila’s growth

Profila accelerated in late 2017 when Shawn met Michiel Van Roey, a Belgian technology, privacy lawyer, and crypto-enthusiast, at that time working in the tech transfer office of the European Center for Nuclear Research in Geneva. Michiel, currently co-founder and general counsel of Profila, had experience as a tech-entrepreneur and added to Shawn’s prior work the required legal knowledge about consumer protection and rights, online advertising, and privacy laws governing (mis)use of people’s personal data. Michiel and Shawn were shortly thereafter joined by Luke Bragg, who would become Profila’s chief product and strategy officer. Luke has spent a good part of his career developing digital solutions in the pharma, consumer product, and NGO space. Profila’s advisory board was created when Clara-Ann Gordon (privacy lawyer at NKF) and Mikko Kotila (AdTech expert) joined the ranks, adding to the team the seniority and years of experience in consumer privacy and online AdTech systems.

Today, the Profila team today counts over 20 people in different roles and levels of engagement. Apart from the core team of 6 people, all with different nationalities, Profila can count on a team of 7  full time developers, a board of 6 experienced advisors with relevant experience in the crypto, AdTech, and privacy space, and an experienced sales team. Startup was recently joined by 3 community managers, from the US, Ireland, and Pakistan, who are responsible for engaging with and responding to our community 24/7.

Profila – Meet Cardano

In Profila’s search for the right technology partner, they fell in love with Cardano, a proof-of-stake blockchain platform founded on peer-reviewed research and developed through evidence-based methods. After presenting the Cardano-community with several use cases, Profila received funding for five different proposals, from an integration with the Cardano blockchain of its crucial privacy and data sharing features, to the integration of Cardano’s decentralized ID solution called Atala Prism, an NFT project converting people’s customer feedback into commercial content for brands and most recently the integration of its own Cardano-native token, ZEKE (short for zero knowledge token) into the Profila app.

In order to increase awareness about the Profila project in the Cardano community, Profila recently signed up 2 big names in the Cardano community that (almost) need no introduction, namely Bullish Dumpling (Twitter) and Hosky (Twitter). Dumpling and Hosky will collaborate as factual “Cardano CMOs” to define, implement and execute Profila’s marketing and community strategy towards the Cardano community.

As a support to its in-house team, Profila is forging strong partnerships with other blockchain projects such as Mlabs (Haskell & Plutus development powerhouse) and Playermint (Cardano NFT and gamification experts) and is being advised by industry experts from LVT Capital (VC and strategic blockchain advisory firm) and Occam.fi (Cardano launchpad, DEX and Accelerator).

2022: Zero Knowledge Token

To deploy their platform and incentivize consumers to use it, Profila has created 500,000,000 Cardano-native tokens called “Zero Knowledge Token” (symbolized “ZEKE”). A part of these tokens will be offered to the public via a token sale on the launch platform of Occam.fi, with the public round starting in April/May 2022.

Sign up for the Profila token sale here.

For more information: 
-          Visit our token sale website: profila.com/token
-          Visit our main website: www.profila.com
-          Download our docs
-          Follow us on: Telegram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Discord, YouTube, Medium