For two decades we've been told data is the new oil. DrumWave's whole point is that you have been sitting on the well and letting everyone else pump it.
Here is a fact that ought to be more annoying than it is. Every day you produce a torrent of data - where you drove, what you bought, how you slept, which videos you watched to the end - and almost all of it accrues to somebody else's balance sheet. Companies collect it, refine it, sell access to it, and train models on it. Your cut of that arrangement, historically, has been the app you got for free. DrumWave Inc., a company based in Mountain View, California, thinks that trade was lopsided, and it has built financial plumbing to argue the point.
The pitch fits on a napkin: your data is money, so treat it like money. Put it somewhere. Let it accrue value. Spend it, or license it, or hold it. The vehicle is the dWallet - a digital wallet where personal and corporate data lives as a certified, tradable asset - and its consumer-facing cousin, the Data Savings Account, which works about the way it sounds. You contribute the data you already generate, and value accumulates, and when a company wants access, it pays, with your consent, and the money lands in your actual bank account.
DrumWave was founded in 2015 by Andre Vellozo, Santiago Ortiz, and Alberto Blumenschein-Cruz. Vellozo, the CEO, is a Brazilian-American entrepreneur who describes himself as a systems thinker working at the intersection of technology, economics, and policy - which is a polite way of saying he wants to change the accounting rules for an entire category of asset. The company operates out of the former offices of General Magic, the legendary 1990s startup that basically imagined the smartphone about a decade before the world was ready for one. It is a fitting address. Being right early is a recurring theme in this neighborhood.
The reason all of this is more than a thought experiment is a word that fintech people love: rails. Owning your data is a nice sentiment, but sentiment does not clear transactions. What DrumWave is actually building is the boring, load-bearing infrastructure - custody, certification, valuation, consent, settlement - that lets a data transaction happen between a person and a company in a machine-to-machine, autonomous way. The metaphor is a savings account; the machinery underneath is closer to a clearinghouse.
DrumWave chose a loud stage to say so. At Money20/20 USA in October 2024, it unveiled the Data Savings Account and the dWallet and called the account the first of its kind. At the same event it made a hire designed to get attention: Brittany Kaiser, the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower, joined as a board advisor and Chief Evangelist for global data ownership rights. There is a certain narrative symmetry in hiring the person who exposed how data gets weaponized to now argue that the people who generate it should own and be paid for it. Whether you find that redemptive or ironic, it is good casting.
Then came the part that turned a product into a policy experiment. In April 2025, at Web Summit Rio, DrumWave and Dataprev - Brazil's state-owned technology company - announced what they billed as the world's first national data monetization program. Dataprev administers more than 60 million payroll-loan contracts, and the pilot targets those borrowers first. The idea: authorized citizens' data gets compiled, certified, and commercialized on their behalf, with proceeds flowing back to them. Estimates floated around $50 a month per participant. That is not going to reprice Silicon Valley, but at national scale it is a genuinely new line item in a household budget.
What makes the Brazil move interesting is less the money than the mechanism. A federal bill, if passed, would formally turn personal data into a commercial asset that citizens hold - the first proposal of its kind anywhere. After the Web Summit presentation, delegations from Scotland, Belgium, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and U.S. states including Virginia, California, and Texas reportedly asked how the model could be copied. A good pilot is not really a product. It is a template other people want to steal.
None of this is guaranteed to work, and it is worth being honest about why. Pricing an individual's data is genuinely hard; a single person's records are worth very little in isolation and only become valuable in aggregate, which reintroduces the very intermediaries the model is trying to disrupt. Regulators may decide that letting people sell sensitive data - health records, say - is a bad idea no matter how consented. And the incumbents who currently get the data for free have no particular incentive to start paying. DrumWave's answer to all of this is not to stop the data market but to get its users a seat inside it. That may be the more realistic fight.
