It was just after sunrise in LA. Anika, head of operations at a smart-mobility startup, is idling in her car at a traffic signal, watching the city awake around her. Her car’s sensors are streaming patterns of speed, braking, congestion, and air quality.
She had seen the data – terabytes per day, ample richness, but almost no way to convert it into value.
Across continents, in Hamburg, Germany, Peter, lead data scientist at a climate modeling lab, was struggling. He had identified a use case: combine vehicle flow data, weather data, and urban air quality readings to forecast local pollution hotspots. But he could not access the freshest traffic sensor data.
The datasets he found were out-of-date, incompatible, or, in most cases, locked behind fragmented and untraceable contracts.
These two professionals, separated by continents and unknown to each other, faced the same obstacle. The data economy is often less a market, more a maze of fragments. They were living in what you might call the data barter era — where data is exchanged via bespoke deals, heavy integration work, and protracted negotiations.
In 2025, this clearly feels anachronistic. We generate more data than ever. But despite data being called the “new oil,” we lack the pipelines, the marketplaces, and the infrastructure to trade it efficiently across domains.
The mismatch between data supply and demand is not just an academic problem — it holds back innovation, revenue, and systemic insights.
A Connected Data Marketplace (CDM), is a global, cloud-native platform that lets data producers and consumers connect seamlessly, transact reliably, and grow the data economy into something as fluid as modern capital markets. Let us explore how this can address the challenges of the data economy.