mPowered is teaming up with Ocean Set to build a marketplace for ocean-related data.
Through St. John’s-based Ocean Set’s partnership with mPowered, the company hopes to build a data marketplace that will serve as a valuable resource for companies, governments, and scientists in the fisheries, aquaculture, transportation, tourism, defence, and energy sectors.
The ocean data marketplace is expected to allow organizations to access, store, retrieve, and profit from sharing data sets without losing control of their data.
Ocean Set was named one of the winners in the 2021 Ocean Startup Project Challenge.
Regarding Ocean Set’s partnership with mPowered, Ocean Set president Peter Rawsthorne said: “We believe this will encourage stakeholders to generate and share even more validated data which will support a sustainable ocean economy and protect marine ecosystems.”
Founded in 2018 by Joel Sotomayor (CEO) and Corrie Sloot (CTO), mPowered provides a web3 technology platform designed to help companies participate in the data economy using blockchain technologies. mPowered’s platform has 22 datasets published to date.
The company was originally founded in Guelph, but is now headquartered in Montréal.
mPowered is owned by JRS Virtual Studio Inc., which has been led by Sotomayor since 2002. Through JRS Virtual Studio Inc., Sotomayor also launched TresspassTracker, a surveillance platform for farms, as well as Transport Genie, a monitoring solution made for transporting livestock and other assets.
Sotomayor said that mPowered was initially created to help people and businesses in the agri-food sector take ownership of their data and benefit from sharing it.
“Expanding our focus to the ocean data economy and protecting marine environments is a great opportunity that fits with our ‘data as a common good’ philosophy and we look forward to helping make the Ocean Set data marketplace a success,” he added.
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Ocean Set is a tech startup focused on organizing ocean data. By exchanging and integrating data from across the ocean sector, the company is developing products and services to allow stakeholders to find, store, manage, and exchange their data effectively.
In July last year, Ocean Set was accepted into online startup accelerator Propel’s Vision and Validation program, which is an initiative focused on supporting founders of very early stage companies. Ocean Set was among five of the companies selected that come from Newfoundland and Labrador. This group includes smart scales provider InVerte, cloud computing services company Skytop Computers, ecommerce startup Servease, and environmental samples equipment vendor ExTech MIP.
Ocean Set was also named one of the winners in the 2021 Ocean Startup Project Challenge, a program dedicated to scaling ocean tech companies. With the support of Canada’s Ocean Supercluster, the Ocean Startup Challenge has doled out more than $1.4 million in last year’s cohort to fund entrepreneurs developing ocean industry solutions. As one of the IDEA streams winners, Ocean Set had the opportunity to receive up to $25,000.
Featured image by Hiroko Yoshii via Unsplash.