André Vellozo Wants to Open a Savings Account for Your Data

Start with the phone. You bought the device, pay the carrier, charge the battery and supply the thumbs. Each ordinary day adds another layer of location traces, purchases, searches, preferences and movement. The phone is sold as a consumer product, but André Vellozo prefers a more provocative classification: production equipment. It is a tiny factory, and its owner has been mislabeled as its customer.

That reframing is the cleanest entrance into Vellozo’s work. The Brazilian-American programmer and entrepreneur founded DrumWave in Palo Alto in 2015 around an idea that first sounds philosophical and then becomes stubbornly practical. If data has economic value, who owns it? How is that ownership recorded? How can a piece of information be authenticated, priced, permissioned and exchanged? And if a person helped generate it, where is that person’s share?

His answer borrows the furniture of finance. A dWallet holds the record. A Data Savings Account organizes value over time. Contracts establish rights between the people and companies whose relationship produced the information. APIs move it. Valuation algorithms attempt to price it. The familiar language is deliberate. Vellozo is not asking people to learn an entirely new economic grammar. He is asking them to notice that the cloud never received the grammar banks already use.

“We are all data-poor and need to become data-rich.”André Vellozo

A childhood at the keyboard

Vellozo was born in Brasília in 1969 and lived in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo while growing up. He began programming as a child. Later profiles describe him as self-taught in cybernetics, a useful label for someone drawn less to isolated machines than to systems, feedback and control. Before DrumWave, his ventures crossed publishing, trade, farming, special effects, authentication and collaborative software. The industries moved. The recurring interest was how people and information coordinate.

That interest produced tangible engineering work. U.S. patents bearing his full name, André Gustavo Vellozo Luz, cover one-time authorization and bidirectional authentication. The systems dealt with trust between a person and a machine: requests, symbols, temporary passwords, secure confirmation. Years before the data wallet, he was already working on the question hiding beneath it. How can a system know that an action is genuine and permitted?

He moved to the United States in the early 2010s and formed DrumWave with Santiago Ortiz and Alberto Blumenschein-Cruz. The company began by serving enterprises, scoring and certifying data for banks, telecommunications businesses and other large organizations. Vellozo funded it with his own money and support from friends and family before a reported $5 million seed round in 2018. This was the unglamorous half of the thesis: before people can earn from information, someone must make the information measurable and trustworthy.

The wallet that missed its moment

DrumWave planned to introduce a data wallet in March 2020. The timing collapsed. The company cut its plan to survival mode, and the clean founder narrative acquired a long detour. It is an instructive one. Infrastructure companies often arrive before the vocabulary needed to explain them. In 2020, “data wallet” sounded adjacent to privacy software or cryptocurrency. Four years later, generative AI had made the appetite for training data a dinner-table subject.

The company kept building. Fernando Teles, after leading Visa in Brazil, joined as president and chief revenue officer in 2021 while Vellozo remained CEO. Advisors and partners brought experience from banking, technology and data-rights campaigns. The coalition hinted at the shape of the problem. A data economy would need software, but code alone could not establish property rights, consumer trust or exchange rules.

At Money20/20 USA in October 2024, DrumWave finally unveiled the dWallet platform and Data Savings Account. The pitch was no longer merely that personal data should be protected. Protection is defensive. Ownership is generative. It can carry the right to say no, but it can also carry the right to negotiate, combine, save or approve a use.

Vellozo likes the distinction between value and price. Data has processing value because energy, hardware and labor turn it into something useful. Its price depends on a buyer, a purpose and a moment. A generic location point may be worth almost nothing. A verified pattern that reduces uncertainty in a specific transaction may be worth much more. There is no magic universal number. The ambition is to create machinery through which context can produce a legible one.

Brazil as a policy workshop

Brazil became central to the project because it had already shown a taste for remaking financial infrastructure. Pix normalized instant payments. Open finance taught institutions to move permissioned customer information. In 2023, a bill introduced in Brazil’s Chamber of Deputies proposed an ecosystem for monetizing data and cited a DrumWave formulation: data is born from a relationship, and relationships are governed by contracts.

That sentence carries much of Vellozo’s worldview. A coffee purchase does not produce information through the customer alone or the café alone. It emerges between them. Co-ownership is therefore more than a moral preference. It is his attempt to describe the origin of the asset. The dWallet becomes a place to record the resulting rights, while the contract determines what each participant may do.

The argument has drawn scrutiny as well as attention. Any system touching personal information must answer difficult questions about consent, custody, inequality, security and the power of intermediaries. Monetization does not dissolve those concerns. It adds a second layer of incentives. The strength of Vellozo’s framing is that it makes the tradeoffs inspectable. Once data is treated as an asset with counterparties, questions that were buried inside terms of service can move into contracts and ledgers.

AI changes the bargaining table

AI gives the thesis urgency. Models depend on vast stores of information, yet the chain of provenance can be muddy and the people represented in the material are often far from the transaction. Vellozo’s preferred future supplies authenticated data with clear permissions. Companies receive fresher, more reliable inputs. Individuals receive control and, where a market exists, a portion of the value.

He has increasingly carried that argument into rooms where technology meets policy. He spoke about the tech supercycle at the Milken Institute’s 2026 global conference and joined a Point Zero Forum discussion in Zurich on governing AI in financial services. DrumWave also joined international conversations about standards and cross-border data flows. His public writing widened from product language to questions of economic participation, reindustrialization and the shape of a middle class after AI.

“If you generate data, you should participate in the value it creates.”André Vellozo

There is a personal consistency to the campaign. In a 2026 lunch conversation near Sand Hill Road, Vellozo used his phone as the prop, turning it face down after describing its hidden productive role. He wore no watch and carried no visible technology logo. He also offered an unexpected reading of Hamlet: a story about the cost of standing in the gap between thought and action. It is easy to see why the play interests him. Data ownership has lived in that gap for years, vivid as an idea and elusive as an institution.

DrumWave’s task is to close it without pretending the market already exists. A wallet needs assets. An account needs custodians. A price needs demand. Ownership needs enforceable rules. Each dependency creates another negotiation with banks, companies, governments and consumers. This is patient, political product development, the kind in which a launch is less an ending than an invitation for other institutions to take a side.

Vellozo’s larger aspiration is distributive. He believes data savings could become a new form of personal and intergenerational asset, a supplement built from the digital activity people already produce. That claim remains a proposal, not a settled economic result. Its power lies in exposing the present arrangement. The AI economy has a raw material. It has processors. It has customers and capital. The producer is everywhere, generating the input one tap at a time, but rarely appears on the ledger.

The phone, then, is more than a clever metaphor. It is a compact audit. You paid for the factory. You keep it powered. You perform the work. Somewhere else, the output acquires a price. André Vellozo has spent a decade asking what kind of account might finally connect those facts.