Pioneering AI & Data Democratization

Antonio Tomarchio stands out as a visionary founder and investor, prominently active in the realms of AI, data, and climate tech. With his profound expertise in mobile marketing, big data, location intelligence, and business intelligence, Antonio has become a respected industry veteran. His deep understanding of SaaS and DaaS (Data as a Service) business models is a testament to his comprehensive knowledge in the tech domain.

Can you tell us about your journey before Fantix and what led you to start this venture?

Before Fantix, my journey unfolded through two successful exits in the Italian market: Adright and Beintoo.

• Adright: A pioneer in recommendation technologies for web publishers, Adright swiftly garnered attention. Just 10 months post-launch, it was acquired by the RCS group, a publishing powerhouse boasting properties like El Mundo, Marca, and Corriere della Sera. For nearly three years, I spearheaded an elite innovation team tasked with infusing Adright tech and cutting-edge digital technologies into the group's properties.
• Beintoo: Witnessing the dawn of the app economy, I launched Beintoo to address the challenges faced by app developers. Beintoo developed a robust platform to gather user engagement data in mobile apps, aiding publishers in data-driven customer acquisition. With prestigious clients like Amazon Kindle, Uber, Opentable, Aeropostale, and more, Beintoo achieved notable success. Ultimately, it was acquired by Mediaset, the second-largest European TV group, evolving into the data engine for the entire Mediaset group.
• Cuebiq: In 2013, my journey led me to the United States with Beintoo. By 2016, we spun off Cuebiq, a New York-based company and a leader in geospatial analytics. Cuebiq prioritized differential privacy, a pivotal privacy-preserving technology.
• Investor and Advisor: Between 2016 and the present, I've served as a business angel, advising 18 companies across AI, big data, and climate tech. This multifaceted experience crystallized the untapped potential within the AI sector, fueling my desire to confront specific challenges and pioneer innovative solutions through the establishment of Fantix.

What is Fantix, and how does it revolutionize the way businesses approach AI model training?

Fantix is a groundbreaking venture revolutionizing the approach to enterprise AI model. Over the past two years, remarkable strides in generative AI have unfolded, particularly in text and media generation. This progress has been propelled by the accessibility of training datasets on the internet, providing model developers with affordable and straightforward access.

While generative AI has flourished, its critical application lies in empowering businesses of all sizes to enhance consumer knowledge and compete with larger players. The disparity in access to vast customer databases, exemplified by Amazon's recommendations, underscores the need for a paradigm shift. Customer insight should not be confined to the exclusive domain of Big Tech.

Enter Fantix, with a groundbreaking mission: to bridge this gap while preserving privacy. Fantix introduces an innovative federated/decentralized learning infrastructure technology, enabling organizations to federate their data effortlessly. This process requires no data movement, sharing, or engineering work, ensuring the data stays within the local premises of each organization, beyond even Fantix's access.

Our vision is to challenge the centralized AI paradigm, democratizing access to generative consumers' AI models, and training data, and fostering open innovation. By providing organizations with equal footing to train models using high-quality data akin to industry giants like Amazon, Fantix strives to cultivate a healthier and more innovative AI society.

Already, a dynamic federation is operational with a dozen partners, covering the entire US adult population across 2,000 attributes. Pre-trained generative consumer AI models are primed for customer acquisition, retention, and decision intelligence/market research. Fantix members can leverage this technology to create private federations, tailoring the application to their unique needs.

Our generative consumer AI models empower Fantix members to deepen customer knowledge, build robust CRM databases, and fuel effective recommendations and retention strategies. They can identify common patterns among top customers, supporting growth initiatives. Additionally, these models create synthetic user panels, enabling critical market research and decision intelligence efforts.

Looking ahead, Fantix plans to open its federated learning infrastructure to external AI developers by the end of 2024. This will usher in a wave of business-focused generative AI open innovation, leveling the playing field for businesses against Big Tech Players.

At Fantix, we are on a mission to redefine the future of AI, fostering inclusivity, innovation, and a fair competitive landscape for businesses of all sizes.

How does Fantix's solution of collaborative learning with data abstraction differentiate from traditional methods in the market?

Fantix's methodology revolves around collaborative learning fortified by privacy-preserving technologies, marking a distinctive departure from conventional methods. This innovative approach empowers Fantix to train generative synthetic data models using extensive repositories of private data that, while not publicly available, can unleash their training potential through our federated learning framework. This framework facilitates collaborative model training among organizations while safeguarding their data within their premises. This heralds the future of AI—a decentralized model poised to provide democratized access to AI models for millions of organizations, regardless of size.

What specific solutions, like CRM enrichment and churn prediction, does Fantix offer, and how do these benefit your clients?

Fantix presents two primary categories of pre-trained AI models:

• A generative model enriching CRM/leads/customer databases, allowing organizations to bridge gaps in consumer knowledge, gaining insights comparable to industry giants like Amazon.
• A generative model creating synthetic user panels with insights into purchase and economy-related behaviors, ideal for market research and decision intelligence.

Fantix has shown impressive traction by partnering with leading data organizations. What strategies contributed to this success?

Our success in partnering with leading data organizations stems from a strategic understanding that large data owners seek to leverage their data for AI training. This strategic approach fosters valuable relationships and has accelerated our growth. The Fantix Federation encompasses dozens of datasets onboarded in the last year, covering over 250 million unique American consumers across thousands of attributes, showcasing the strength and depth of our privacy-preserving Federation.

Your Go-To-Market strategy currently focuses on Italy and the USA, with plans to expand in the UK. What are the key factors driving this decision?

Focused on the US market due to mature clients with a deep understanding of data, we are exploring strategic partnerships in the UK through investors with in-depth market knowledge.

Could you shed some light on the team behind Fantix, including experienced entrepreneurs and experts in growth? How do they contribute to Fantix’s success?

The Fantix team is a dynamic mix of experienced entrepreneurs, big data and AI professionals, and growth experts. Their collective expertise significantly contributes to Fantix's ongoing success.

With the Big Data market growing rapidly, how does Fantix position itself to capitalize on this market potential?

In the rapidly growing Big Data market, Fantix positions itself as an innovator, bringing the power of generative AI to enterprises of all sizes through its privacy-preserving collaborative learning framework. This strategy ensures we leverage opportunities and stay at the forefront of industry advancements.

Where do you see Fantix in the next five years in terms of market presence and technological advancement?

Over the next five years, Fantix aims to become the hub for generative synthetic data models. We plan to open our privacy-preserving federation of datasets to AI developers, allowing them to create and distribute their models in a revenue-sharing model. Q1 will see three partnerships with leading AI companies announced, showcasing our commitment to this vision.

How has the support from investors like Connect Ventures and Italian Angels for Growth impacted the growth and strategy of Fantix?

Investor support is critical for business development, fundraising, and overall go-to-market strategy. Early-stage investors play a pivotal role in supporting startups, and Fantix values their contribution immensely.

What challenges have you faced as a founder, and how have you overcome them?

Founder challenges, including product-market fit definition, focused go-to-market strategy, maintaining focus amidst opportunities, and fundraising in a challenging economic environment, have been navigated successfully by the experienced Fantix team. Our strong product-market fit is evident in the size of our Federation.

Why should investors support Fantix?

Fantix is an opportunity for Investors to be part of the AI revolution. Fantix is poised to be the leader in Enterprise AI, it has a very strong competitive moat as we have access to cornered and private databases for the training of accurate and performing AI models, we enjoy network effects as the more data in the federation the higher the value for our clients and once a client integrates our model the switching costs are very high, which means that we will enjoy high retention. All of the factors above will support growth and profitability.

Explore the opportunity on SeedBlink.