Finisterra
By Diogo Mónica
Today, I’m happy to announce that we have led a seed investment in Finisterra Labs, the makers of Baselight.
The amount of data on the internet continues to explode, but the need for high-quality, structured data continues to be a critical bottleneck for humans and AI models alike. In 2010, the world generated 2 zettabytes of data. By 2024, this figure had increased 74-fold to 149 zettabytes, with data analytics driving an estimated $300B in worldwide revenue. This exponential growth is expected to continue, with projections indicating that the world will generate almost 400 zettabytes of data by 2028.
For a long time, the building blocks necessary for a platform to aggregate and incentivize the upkeep of high-quality data haven’t existed. But that’s changed.
Finisterra Labs has created Baselight, a decentralized data marketplace and analytics platform for high-quality structured data, designed to break down data silos, making it easier and more cost-effective to obtain and use such data. You can think about this as an open-source Wikipedia for structured data (rather than encyclopedic knowledge) where those who contribute data are rewarded for their contributions. We think Finisterra’s product is uniquely possible through decentralized, blockchain technology.
Right now, AI companies, crypto companies, traders and developers of all types face a common problem: they need to scrape the same data across the internet, clean it up, and augment it before they can make use of it. This ETL (extract-transform-load) process is a very common pattern for any company that relies on external data collection. One interesting side effect of ETL processes is that you have many different organizations cleaning, augmenting, and processing the same data for one-time use.
Baselight allows any company that has created valuable structured data to put it for sale in a marketplace. Conversely, it allows any company wishing to access high-quality structured data to avoid running resource-intensive ETL processes, replacing this with the ability to simply query the final result. Baselight leverages cryptography in a couple of different ways. First, crypto economics can incentivize contribution and upkeep of high-quality data, particularly niche data sets that may be more cumbersome to collect and maintain. Second, stablecoins can be used as a low-friction, low-cost, payment mechanism.
We believe the Finisterra team, based in Europe, was founded by a set of three individuals, with deep experience in distributed systems, data infrastructure, cryptography, and blockchain technology. The founders have worked on projects like Quorum, Dune, and Filecoin, which are adjacent to the goal they are trying to accomplish. The CEO, Henrique, is a PhD in distributed systems who also has practical experience building large-scale systems at companies like Google and JPMorgan.
We’re delighted to support Henrique Moniz, Jorge M. Soares, and Alfonso de la Rocha as they build this critical infrastructure to make sense of the world’s data.
If you’re interested in seeing what it looks like, check out Baselight.ai and feel free to ping me for an alpha invite!
