The Short Version

Prifina is the result of many years of hands-on experience and creative drive. From its very inception, Prifina’s vision has been to create a personal data platform that merges individual data ownership rights with the cutting-edge potential of an open data market. We aim to accomplish our goal by giving our platform two key features. First, it allows individuals to create private, personal data clouds, in which they can store, collect, organize, and review their own personal data. Second, it gives developers the opportunity to create applications that run on user-held data and market their applications directly to users. Individuals can then run these applications using data in their personal data cloud, allowing them to get maximum value from their own personal data while still retaining data ownership and control. Our goal is to create an accurate, efficient data economy that champions the rights of individuals and enables them to gain meaningful value from personal data. 

We’re currently developing our own application, which allows users to track their health, biometric, and activity data to get better insights into how their habits and behaviors contribute to their overall well-being. Our application combines data from wearables (like Fitbit and Oura Ring) with other health data a user decides to upload to their cloud. It then shows correlations between habits and behaviors and health and biometric data, providing a clearer picture of the relationship they share. This application also demonstrates the underlying data pipeline developers can use when building their own applications in Prifina’s developer ecosystem.

Prifina’s team consists of six serial entrepreneurs, each of whom has decades of experience in data science, fintech, and software. Prifina’s team members have built more than a dozen companies, several of which were later acquired by publicly traded corporations. We believe that our diverse and rich experience will help us improve how private, critical data will be used in the near future. 

As of 2021, Prifina has a community of 20,000+ developers around the world, all of whom are actively engaged in the effort to help individuals get real value from their data. 

​We are based in Silicon Valley, the hottest innovation hub on the planet, where we believe our vision and ideas are most likely to gain support. Prifina’s technical team is led from Europe.

The Long Version

In 2004, Jouko Ahvenainen - Prifina’s Chairman - and Kimmo Kiviluoto - Prifina’s Technical Advisor - were running a data analytics company (today we would call it Machine Learning and AI), and were contemplating how to manage data in a way that generated value for all stakeholders. After a long strategy call with Kimmo, Jouko started imagining a distributed data model in which data was controlled by individuals, rather than companies. What if, he thought, people could actually own their data and get value from it?
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Jouko quickly brought his idea to Kimmo. Not long after, Kimmo, Jouko, and the company’s chief data scientist filed their first patent application (a processing device, a system, and a method for providing a message to a user). Their idea was to develop an app inside a handset that would gather information about the user’s behavior, find relevant information about the user, and filter messages and content.

Kimmo and Jouko’s company also had another unique idea: conducting social network analytics. In 2005, social network sites were just starting to emerge, and the prospect of analyzing their data was a totally new idea. As it turned out, developing social network analytics took up all of Jouko and Kimmo’s time and resources, while their vision for a distributed data model ended up being ahead of its time (six months before the launch of iPhone, one venture capitalist bluntly told Jouko and Kimmo that people would never install apps on their phones and that it was not realistic to think they would care about controlling the data in their phones). But they never forgot about their idea for a user-centric data platform.
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After a time, Kimmo and Jouko decided to work on their own respective ventures. Kimmo started running a different data analytics company, while Jouko teamed up with Valto Loikkanen and Markus Lampinen. Together, Jouko, Valto, and Markus founded and invested in several fintech companies and played an important role in getting equity crowdfunding legalized. They also implemented the first investment platform and created cloud-based finance back offices and finance engines, which drove innovation in the fintech market.

In 2017, Jouko and Valto came to the conclusion that it was no longer unique to collect and monetize data; it had become part of common business practice. Nevertheless, they recognized that only a few companies possessed data that really added value to their business. With that in mind, Jouko and Valto piloted new, innovative data models using crowdfunding and p2p lending data, but concluded that their inventions weren’t disruptive.

At the end of 2017, Jouko and Valto realized that people, regulators, and technology were ready for a change in how personal data was owned and used. Jouko remembered his old dream of creating a user-centered data platform, and discussed it with Valto. Together, they collaborated with Tero Ahola and several developers on building technical trials and test systems related to private data storage and management, in which third parties could access data controlled by a private individual. They were encouraged by their results, which pointed to a market in which developers could build applications using user-held data and sell them directly to consumers. They paired this idea with Jouko’s old vision of creating a user-centric data platform that enables individuals to own and earn value from their personal data, and thus Prifina was born.

Jouko met Paul Jurcys at the Blockchain Economic Forum in San Francisco in June 2018. Paul had been working in personal data and privacy law for several years at that point, including working at Google on issues related to Right to Be Forgotten. They had several interesting discussions about data, privacy, and new data models that could empower individuals using their own private information. Jouko told Paul about Prifina’s vision, and Paul decided to join the team as Prifina’s data privacy and regulation expert.

In December 2018, Jouko invited Markus to join Prifina as its CEO. Markus was initially reluctant to leave the fast-growing fintech company he was leading, Difitek Inc., which he had co-founded with Valto and Jouko, but was inspired by the vision of an open data market and personal feedom it would usher in, and became part of the founding team as Prifina’s CEO. Around the same time, Kimmo, whom Jouko had been in contact with, joined Prifina as its Technical Advisor for data products.

Thank you for your interest in Prifina and its history! To learn more about each of our team members, please visit our Leadership page.
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Liberty. Equality. Data.