Our 2016 year review hinted Artifical Intelligence and Blockchain would make all the noise in 2017. However, this year’s data revealed three other signals which appeared on our radar.
Peace
We released a live sheet with now 78 CivicTech initiatives and an Online Dispute Resolution (ODR) dashboard. At one point this year CivicTech was the most valuable market in the Legalpioneer dataset. If CivicTech is the technology for policing our society, then ODR will be our court of justice. The main reason ODR appeared on our radar this year is the fact that out of 4 startups we registered using Blockchain to settle disputes, 3 of these were founded in 2017.
The political events this year have demonstrated how fragile a fair society is. How easy it is to lose stability in communities. And how expensive it has become for peace to prevail. CivicTech and ODR may be two ways to reclaim some civility and make our lives great again.
Privacy
In order to find startups in the Data Protection (GDPR) and Privacy space, we analyzed 197 providers of GDPR solutions and found 68 that fit our profile. Similar to what we had noticed in ODR, the dataset revealed a 100% growth of Blockchain startups in 2017. If you were to rank ODR, GDPR, Intellectual Property (IP), and Blockchain as separate markets, GDPR is the second largest based on a total investment of $151 million in startups founded after 2010.
However, it is not the reason privacy surfaced in our analysis, it was data indicating a polar opposite trend.
Payment provider Wepay did a study among small business owners to find out their single biggest problem: Fraud. RiskTech startups founded after 2010 which focus on fraud prevention by Knowing Your Customer (KYC) have a combined total investment of $1.5 billion.
Are you worried that your data may be stolen and appear on the dark web? This startup has you covered. But if you like online shopping, want to quickly get insurance or credit, be prepared to get naked.
Party
If PrivacyTech is the second largest market in LegalTech, Intellectual Property Tech (IPTech) is number #1 with approximately $1.2 billion invested.
Kobalt Music this year became the most funded ($805 million) LegalTech Company ever. United Masters is less than a year old and raised the current highest seed ($70 mln) of any LegalTech startup since 2016. By comparison, DoNotPay got $1.1 million seed in a seemingly bigger legal market with fewer competitors. Spotify spent over $150 million acquiring various AI (Niland) and Blockchain (Mediachain) startups to help it respectively find and managed music copyrights.
We mentioned before that LegalTech did not produce the profitable exits for investments. The exception is music copyright startups and they are leading the way once more in showing how lucrative the entertainment industry really is.
Finally, you can stop wondering where the party at.
Produce
To sum this all up: scholars called religion the earliest version of Virtual Reality (VR). If so then the Rule of Law is the most powerful VR game ever created. That is why we need CivicTech and ODR to keep the cheats in check.
We have given Google and Facebook more information about ourself then we may realize, just to find what we need or connect with our friends. Yet we are on the verge to volunteer more data for the convenience of online commerce. We won’t mind sacrificing our privacy for a discount and we’ll always click “Ok” to proceed to get what we want.
All this relentless automation will naturally lead to more leisure. Time we’ll use to indulge our creativity and be entertained. This will produce an economy of art that will rival the Renaissance. Some are already cashing in so let the party begin..
Stay tuned: we’ll wrap up this year on Christmas Eve with our 2017 review:
2017: Year of The Records, The Recognition, & The Reckoning.