Data is ubiquitous but surprisingly hard to access. Many important datasets are fragmented across organizations and infrastructure, a situation which greatly limits the success of data-driven initiatives. This is the case for public interest projects, as well as inside large corporations.
We are building the scie.nz hub, a platform to bring about better outcomes for collaborations based on data.
At its core, the scie.nz hub relies on code generation to facilitate the on-demand creation of recipes for common data science tasks.
A public version of the scie.nz hub can be seen at woo.scie.nz, which shows a few example applications. For instance, by going to woo.scie.nz/nyt-covid, users can get code to download the latest COVID-19 datasets from the New York Times. You can see an example for how this data is accessed at the end of this document.
This code is currently available in two widely-used programming languages -- R and Python. More languages will be supported in the future; multiple data formats are available in each language. Furthermore, the core technology behind the hub supports multiple data orchestration frameworks, including the very popular Apache Airflow.
The hub is meant as a one-stop shop for the data consumer. The end user is oftentimes interested in simply accessing the data, and the hub gives them code to do just that. "Just give me the data already!" is the common complaint which the hub seeks to address.
We envision the technology behind the scie.nz hub powering both internal hubs inside corporate and government organizations, as well as public hubs disseminating open data that can help address the pressing problems of humanity. We are particularly passionate about making open data more accessible to everyone, but expect the enterprise market would truly enable us to grow sufficiently big to pursue our mission of liberating data.
Scie.nz is a profitable, and growing, small business, bootstrapped via AI consulting revenue from contracts with multiple Fortune 500 companies and a number of international NGOs. Recently we have reached the conclusion that we would like to focus more time on our very promising product, which is why we are seeking to raise a Seed Round. Seed money would allow us to dedicate more time to building the technology behind the scie.nz hub, to hire programmers, product managers and a sales team.
Another important task for us is securing a "lighthouse client." Working with such a client could allow us to focus on refining our product offering while working to address a concrete set of use cases. Even though we do intend to sell our technology commercially, we would offer our first large client a license in perpetuity to use the scie.nz hub technology. We would also be open to a hybrid arrangement, where a client also becomes an investor in scie.nz, to further align both sides' incentives for success.
We would be especially thrilled if we got to build a "sustainability hub." Data in the economic development space is notoriously fragmented and difficult to access, and we would be keen to help address these issues.
