Self-sovereign Personal AI

Today, you don’t own your data. You may have rights, but practically most people are just accepting to not control their digital life by using products and services they can’t live without. Some Big tech and AI companies are running massive, expensive, and environmentally damaging infrastructures to support running their technology. 6 billion people’s lives are represented in 120 zettabytes of data each year yet the people themselves do not benefit in any monetary way. Big tech and LLMs ingest and monetize this data, $2.5 trillion, and increasing exponentially. And, the recent explosion of generative AI models is only possible because of our data. The seismic shifts of AI are upon us and so are its perils. The choice to earn an income from the use of data by AI is an urgent imperative since AI is projected to replace 15% of workers or 400 million people, worldwide before 2030.

The control of your personal data needs a paradigm shift putting human values, privacy, accountability, and equitable compensation at the center. The consequences of continuing on a path where a few companies own our data and control our digital lives, increase data exposure risk, exacerbate our already compromised climate, and continue to devalue people the fair value they deserve from their data.

Regulation can provide some relief, but it may stifle legitimate data sharing and may prove to be ineffective as most people are just giving away their consent without reading through the policies to simply access and use free and omnipresent communication services. So the solution needs also to be a technological one. 

Rainfall unlocks a multi-trillion dollar opportunity by generating monetizable high-value personal intelligence by combining self-sovereign data, advanced edge-based AI, and decentralized blockchain technologies. We believe that self-sovereign data is a fundamental human right. And our goal is to enable the next billion people coming online access to recurring income earned from their data safely and securely. The true potential of responsible technology emerges when it positively impacts globally the lives of every person, transforming how technology touches their daily experiences.

Rainfall AI is a novel privacy-preserving personal AI platform that enables people to unlock the economic value from the real-time intelligence generated from their self-sovereign data. For the first time, everyone will be able to earn an equitable income from their own data while maintaining privacy and control. Rainfall’s AI is built on a responsible, self-sovereign model – the AI lives entirely on the edge so no personal data leaves the device, represents the user (control, privacy, and income), and is transparent with a tiny energy footprint (since it runs on existing user devices). Our unique, patented edge-based AI algorithms generate hyper-personalized models using every day data on the device, ensuring individual control and protection of Personal Identifiable Information (PII) at all times. 

Our AI unlocks the data-driven narratives of people’s individual and collective lives, without compromising privacy, which enables businesses to better understand, engage, and serve new and existing customers. Rainfall’s edge-based AI interprets the context, comprehension, and composition of real-world actions of people delivering contextually relevant behavioral insights in real time. Businesses pay for these insights, which in turn allows individuals to earn from the data they generate every day, in an automated, friction-free platform. We provide the opportunity to earn recurring income in Raindrops, our native token. The majority of the proceeds are paid to the creator of the data, allowing impoverished communities to earn a daily income estimated at $4-6 per day. 

Additionally, Rainfall has a low carbon footprint as our edge-based processing adds marginal compute utilization in contrast to a centralized LLM approach, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT which releases 870 metric tons of CO2 in a year and excessive amounts of water every time a user puts in a prompt.

Product demo:

Rainfall's human-centered design:

• Allows users to set their privacy level and data source preferences with ease

• Demonstrates full transparency on data usage and history

• Fully automates data monetization with no additional involvement on the part of the user

• Can be embedded and fully customized into partner apps via our SDK and developer tools

In summary, Rainfall's solution:

• Delivers contextually relevant, real-time, behavioral insights generated from self-sovereign data

• Removes the data exposure risk for businesses by utilizing Rainfall's unique privacy-preserving personal AI capabilities integrated on top of a decentralized infrastructure

• Provides an end-to-end solution optimized for low-energy compute, minimal storage, & verifiable transparency delivering unparalleled cost advantage to businesses

Rainfall believes in a self-sovereign data future, that is private, equitable, and sustainable for all.

Exponential technology has the potential to change the lives of billions of humans positively. And yet, we have seen the greatest use of AI and the Blockchain benefit a mere handful of the earliest adopters with the most capital (or ability to take risks with access to capital). At Rainfall we believe that the power of AI and its interplay with decentralized architecture and fair economics can meaningfully impact the lives of the next billion connected humans - from the refugees who have had to flee from their home countries and climate disasters, the people in the streets of South Asia who might not have the privilege of shelter and the most vulnerable in sub-Saharan Africa, just as much as we can create value for the people who live connected lives in the Northern economies. They all have something in common - they now have smartphones. Simple, inexpensive Android devices in under-developed locations or fancy iPhones elsewhere. And they all generate a collective 650 billion GB of data (and growing exponentially) every year. 

While the data from Susan, a mother of 2 living in San Francisco and driving a modern electric car has an obvious value from a retail perspective, Rainfall’s AI will create intelligent insights from her location, appointments for the week, distances she has to travel, preferences for the coffee she likes, and the time she has to take her daughter to soccer practice that can suggest when she should charge her car, at which charging station (the one a block away from the soccer field, with the lowest occupancy at 3 pm and a Joe and the Juice with dairy-free milk options attached to it) and to allow her to pay for the charge using the Raindrops she has been earning for sharing her data - securely and privately, there is value for Rashida’s data living in a camp at the border across Turkey, in a different context.

Or in the case of Rashida’s data (see example mentioned above), which tells a story of daily patterns where new viruses and bacteria have a higher likelihood (and frequency) of evolving. Making intelligent models from the context of her life and the people around her that can be used by companies that produce antibiotics and vaccines to run pre-clinical trials for answers to these evolving viruses can provide similar financial value to the sources of the data - Rashida (and others around her), without compromising their right to privacy.

Simply put - data is universal. It is generated by even the more vulnerable in society, not just those living in established economies. And data is not not being fairly used, nor fairly compensated for. At Rainfall, we are building to change this. For everyone.

When self-sovereignty becomes the guiding principle, true personal AI can represent and help individuals like Rashida rebuild their lives with dignity and control.

The leadership team at Rainfall has over 10 decades of collective experience in bringing deep-tech applications to market, with particular expertise in AI, dating back to 2006. We are thought leaders who share a passion for building a more equitable and responsible future.

Amit Pradhan, co-founder and CEO, is a well-known entrepreneur, investor, and speaker in the AI and Blockchain world and is deeply involved in using exponential technologies for Good. He is a Responsible Leader at the BMW Foundation, President of the Silicon Valley Blockchain Society, and a Board Member of the Norwegian Refugee Council. For over 6 years, Amit has evangelized the challenges of privacy in an increasingly AI-powered world, and much of his work culminated in the creation of Rainfall.

Mark Strehlow, co-founder and CXO, is a seasoned entrepreneur, investor, and award-winning designer. As the VP of Design at Truvalue Labs, he was instrumental in building the leading AI-driven Sustainability data and insights provider in the capital markets. Mark has over 20+ years in product strategy, UX/UI design, branding, and marketing. Mark leads the product, design, and brand initiatives, promising to make the experience of Rainfall magical for the next billion.

Rajesh Pradhan, co-founder and CTO, is a pioneer in multi-sensory recognition and Edge AI. With 20+ years of experience as a deep tech architect and programmer, he has spent the last 10 years building next-gen AI systems. He is the inventor of the local-on-device AI algorithms that power Zero.

Philippe Lucet, co-founder and Chief Legal Officer, is a Swiss-based lawyer and the former VP General Counsel of R&D/IP at Nestle, as well as. Company Secretary at Nestle Institute of Health Sciences. Philippe is a board member at the Netcomm Suisse Association, and General Counsel of the Silicon Valley Blockchain Society. Philippe’s 20+ years of extensive expertise in IP, Tech, and Blockchain solutions guide our legal strategy.

Charly Kleissner, leads the Rainfall Advisory Board. Charly co-founded Toniic the Impact Investor Network, the 100 Percenters Network, and KL Felicitas Foundation. He is the Chairman of the board of ImpactAssets; the ex-CTO of Ariba; and built the NeXT Operating System alongside Steve Jobs. Charly is writing the Impact and Governance Manifesto for Rainfall. 

Also on the Advisory Board are four amazing women: Brittany Kaiser, the Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower, star of the ‘Great Hack’ and leader of the #OwnYourData Foundation; Marsha Vande Berg, Governance Expert, Distinguished Fellow at Stanford; Rumman Chowdhury, the Global AI Ethics Lead at Accenture and Sari Stenfors, PhD in the field of Strategic Management and Business Technology, she teaches Innovative Entrepreneurship in fragile countries.

Leveraging a human-focused design process, we have prototyped, tested, and learned by gathering input from our communities through user interviews, iterative testing, and focus groups. We also lean on our expert advisors for guidance and advice on how to best build and engage with our community. The entire team is committed to bringing the value of Rainfall to the most underserved communities worldwide.

We have designed, tested, and built an MVP (minimum viable product) iOS beta app that is in private beta testing on TestFlight (Rainfall Beta link). Our pilot program partners are testing the platform and validating the value proposition. We are gathering critical go-to-market learnings. We have a couple hundred beta users who have installed the app on their iPhones and are already earning our native token, Raindrops, for permissioning us to use their data to build their Personal Intelligence Model (PIM). We have a few hundred additional users on our waitlist for the Android version.

We have partnered with Nillion to build the highest level of data security for our platform. Nillion’s unique, decentralized 'blind compute' infrastructure provides secure storage and processing of AI model weights, which enables Rainfall to generate federated model aggregation in our decentralized network while ensuring data privacy.

We have architected a system to maximize the efficient flow of value in Raindrops (RDP - ERC 1155 token). Our friction-free automated model algorithmically values the real-time social intelligence derived from user data by completing transactions of buyers of the intelligence to compensate the users for their fair share of the income Rainfall generates. Algorithms manage the automatic allocation of Raindrops to the data creators.

As to our go-to-market approach, we are actively in discussion with significant marketplace partners, non-profit organizations, and interest-based networks that have millions of active users. In addition, we are building out our SDK and developer ecosystem so third-party app developers can embed the Rainfall technology into any app, providing the same benefits to their customers. 

We have closed both a Seed investment round in 2021, and an initial Staking round in 202, and actively closing our second Staking round in preparation for a testnet launch later this year.

We are applying to Solve to expand our network of impact-minded leaders across industries and sectors as part of our go-to-market strategy for mass adoption. The main reason is to assist with partnerships and go-to-market activities in developing countries and/or how to reach the most vulnerable individuals in the world. 

We believe we will benefit from MIT’s rigorous product review and due diligence process to further validate our impact and improve our strategy as we bring our product to market. We are specifically looking for the chance to participate in curated opportunities to connect and network with impressive peers as well as increase exposure of our product in the media, at conferences and events. Solve’s guidance on how to build an impact measurement practice along with the other support programs will benefit our team’s growth.

With Solve’s support, our goal is to break through cultural or market barriers to truly impact the most vulnerable communities with the opportunity to earn universal daily income from our circular data economy. 

The Rainfall solution is innovative in that we are improving the future of the data economy to compensate the originators of the data themselves. Our human-centered design is self-sovereign, decentralized, and privacy-preserving, therefore flips the paradigm of the current data economy dominated by Big Tech and creates a source of Universal Earned Income (UEI). If anyone with a smartphone could earn a recurring income from permissioning their data, we could lift the impoverished out of poverty as well as create significant opportunities for AI to augment lives. Rainfall is approaching the data marketplace with a new, innovative mindset: to create economic value from abundance intelligence for all.

Our solution is bringing together AI technology and solving hot topic issues and problems: transparency, privacy, and loss of income. At the heart of our solution is a commitment to data privacy. Our innovative, patented edge-based AI algorithms generate hyper-personalized intelligence models using self-sovereign data on the device, ensuring individual control and protection of personal data at all times. Rainfall is responsibly developing AI, with a human-centered focus emphasizing fairness, transparency, accountability, and privacy. Our solution is innovative because it empowers humans to understand AI outcomes, make informed choices, and have control at all times over the use of their data. In addition, our solution is environmentally superior to centralized LLMs that emit more than 870 metric tons of CO2 per year. Our edge-based processing has a low carbon footprint and adds marginal compute utilization.

Lastly, Rainfall’s business model is circular: we are creating value for both the data creators and the organizations that want to better understand their customers. We generate dynamic ‘living’ intelligence by contextualizing real-time data events and training edge-based hyper-personalized intelligence models. Our innovative solution is a predictive-generative model that unlocks high-value behavioral insights that empower businesses to better serve their customers.

Rainfall will empower billions of people to take back control and derive value from their data, safely and securely by enabling global access to universal earned income and personal AI generated from their digital existence.

Rainfall enables data creators to generate personal intelligence models (PIM) from their self-sovereign data. From these PIMs the Rainfall system generates contextualized insights and algorithmically creates a proof of value and allocation of value for these insights. All this information is embedded in smart contracts on-chain to ensure transparency and accountability. Buyers such as businesses, NGOs, governments, and foundations prompt the Rainfall Fabric to generate these insights after they pay for them. The majority of the proceeds from the purchase of these insights by Buyers are then allocated back to the data creators who generated the data in the first place.

Rainfall automatically deposits the earnings into the Rainfall wallets of the respective data creators whose PIM contributed to the purchased insight. In the Rainfall wallet, the data creator can keep track of their earnings and always maintain control of the data they choose to permission in their settings.

The outcome is data creators will generate recurring universal earned income and personal intelligence from their self-sovereign data on Rainfall.

The world’s most vulnerable population is increasing with 575M expected to be living in poverty by 2030.

Rainfall Impact Goal: Create economic value for the next billion through a limitless resource that is only increasing exponentially - data. 

Target: by 2030 onboard people in poverty everywhere to eradicate extreme poverty (people living on less than $1.25 per day). 

Indicator: People formerly in poverty are making $2 or more per day on average with Rainfall.

Fifteen percent of jobs are expected to disappear by 2030 because of AI, approximately 400M jobs.

Rainfall Impact Goal: Create inclusive, sustainable value and economic growth for data creators by creating a hyper-personalized intelligence model on the device and monetizing the derived insights. 

Target: by 2030 onboard people at risk of losing their jobs to access their personal intelligence model (PIM) to enhance their lives with learning and work opportunities while earning daily income from the data they create. 

Indicator: Contribute to the annual growth rate of real GDP per capita. 

Generative AI comes with high environmental costs: currently, chatGPT emits 870 metric tons of CO2 yearly based on its usage by approximately 180 million users, and this number is increasing daily. Plus, every time a user prompts CPT-3, it consumes 500 milliliters of water.

Rainfall Impact Goal: Develop Responsible AI systems that have a minimal environmental impact by processing on the Edge.

Target: SDK by Q4 2024 so third-party app developers can embed the Rainfall technology into any app, providing the same benefits to their customers.  

Indicator: CO2 emission is minimal.

Refugee numbers are at an all-time high.

Rainfall Impact Goal: Sustain a Universal Earned Income for the most vulnerable communities, regardless of social, economic, and political background, irrespective of age, sex, disability, race, ethnicity, origin, religion, or economic or other status.

Target: By 2025, onboard the most vulnerable refugees to Rainfall

Indicator: 50% or more of people in refugee camps are earning income from their data with Rainfall.  

AI technology is increasing exponentially and is environmentally unsustainable at the rate of growth.

Rainfall Impact Goal: Provide open-source access to AI developers who prefer to have minimal environmental impact when developing AI technology solutions by using Rainfall’s edge-based processing. 

Indicator: CO2 emissions and water waste on centralized LLMs are reduced because more developers are building decentralized self-sovereign AI systems

Currently, AI technology companies do not have to report consumption or production patterns.

Rainfall Impact Goal: Promote transparency and accountability for AI solutions and lead by example with our sustainable, decentralized, edge-based AI processing. 

Indicator: Centralized LLMs are held accountable for reporting consumption and must achieve solutions to reduce environmental impact by 2030.

Rainfall leverages innovative, cognitive edge-based AI and decentralized proof of stake blockchain technologies to preserve the privacy of data creators and monetize consent-based data while generating real-time social intelligence for data buyers. Rainfall’s unique, patented AI algorithms generate hyper-personalized intelligence models using self-sovereign data on the device, ensuring individual control and protection of Personally Identifiable Information (PII). In the Rainfall Fabric, we combine Edge Intelligence Models (EIM), capable of recreating individual behaviors and predicting behaviors based on context, and Large Intelligence Models (LIM), the federated combination of the various individual EIMs to generate a collective intelligence model to build Real-time Social Intelligence (RSI). Our Active Cortical Ensembles (ACE) neural nets run on-device, creating these hyper-personalized EIMs, which encode individual behaviors based on past events without the need to store any raw data as well as make behavioral predictions based on current events as they happen. Partners can embed the Rainfall EIM nodes via an SDK to interface with the decentralized Rainfall Fabric to generate demand-driven RSI via our customizable APIs.

The core technology that is used to power Rainfall is:

Edge-based neural networks - Lightweight neural network algorithms are computational models based on biological neural networks that are capable of running on small storage and low-compute environments. They are designed to recognize patterns and learn from data by iteratively adjusting the weights and biases of interconnected nodes, enabling tasks such as classification, regression, and generation.

Discriminative AI - Discriminative AI models, in the realm of machine learning, are algorithms designed to directly model and learn the boundary between different classes or categories in a dataset.

Generative AI - Generative AI capabilities that create new data, content, or outputs, based on patterns learned from existing data, typically achieved through techniques like generative adversarial networks (GANs), variational autoencoders (VAEs), or autoregressive models.

Proof of Stake (PoS) Blockchain - A distributed database that maintains a continuously growing list of ordered records, called blocks.” These blocks are linked using cryptography. Each block contains a cryptographic hash of the previous block, a timestamp, and transaction data.

Decentralized Ledgers - A decentralized ledger is a record of all transactions on a network. This ledger is maintained and updated by many independent nodes, who collaborate based on a ruleset established by the protocol.

Zero Knowledge Proofs - Zero-knowledge proofs are a powerful tool that can be used to enhance privacy and security, comply with regulations, improve scalability and interoperability, and provide secure identity verification. They allow for the verification of information without revealing the underlying data.

Decentralized multiparty compute (MPC) -  A cryptographic technique that allows multiple parties to jointly compute a function over their inputs while keeping those inputs private. In blockchain wallets, MPC technology enables users to create and manage digital assets without exposing their private keys.

Total = 30 team members

8 full-time and 20 part-time contractor team members plus 2 hands-on advisors 

4 Leadership/ cofounders

2 Ops 

2 Marketing

2 Product

18 Engineering and QA

2 Subject matter expert advisors

The leadership team at Rainfall has extensive experience in building and bringing deep-tech applications to market, with particular expertise in AI, dating back to 2006. The team has been working for 10+ years with big data and AI technology and 4+ years on token economics and blockchain technology solutions.

At Rainfall, we strongly believe that embedding Diversity, Equity, and Inclusivity into our culture and processes yields the most innovative team and solutions. While our team is still small, we are culturally diverse, spanning three continents - India, Europe, and North America - and working remotely. We prioritize growth through active listening and learning with an inclusion mindset. Our collaborative perspective and process encourage all opinions and ideas, no matter your role. Our process is anchored in Agile principles and supported by human-centered design thinking.

We strive to create a place where everyone feels they are safe and belong so we can all produce the best and most important work of our lives: creating a more equitable and responsible future for all. At Rainfall, everyone has the power, voice, and agency to shape programs and operations. We actively work to end all forms of systemic discrimination and foster an inclusive working environment where everyone feels respected, heard, valued, and supported.

Our leadership team is composed of diverse thought leaders with extensive experience in deep tech, with particular expertise in AI. We are sincerely passionate about our mission to build a more equitable future, starting with our own organization. At Rainfall, we all believe that the future of work is equitable and inclusive.

The Rainfall business model is unique and designed to scale across geographies and verticals. As Rainfall’s AI creates real-time insights, our pricing algorithms estimate their value for contextually relevant buyers. This estimated value is then deducted from the wallets of the buyer(s) and 85% of it is algorithmically distributed to the users whose data (and the resulting PIMs) generated the insights in the first place. 15% of the remaining value is split between Rainfall, partners, and the underlying infrastructure that powers our decentralized network. What this means for the users is that they earn a majority of their income from the value their data generated (for the first time in the world of technology), typically estimated to range between $2 and $8 per day when the system is fully operational. Businesses, the buyers of the intelligence, receive real-time insights on their existing users, to help learn more about them and serve them more efficiently while being on the right side of the future of data ownership, compensation, and privacy. 

Built on a PoS chain (Proof of Stake), all transactions in the system are done with the Raindrop (RDP), the Rainfall native token. The token is a pure demand-based token: the buyers of the real-time social intelligence use RDP to pay for the intelligence and this gets distributed then to the data creators, validators, and even our token investors. We want investors to be able to hold their tokens and earn RDP from the revenue of the system as well.

In addition, the supply is based on the growth of the system. The more demand there is for the core intelligence (and more data/more users), the system will require tokens. First, from people who want to sell, and only then, from any new supply created. This ensures a demand-driven model, rather than the usual supply-based one.

Currently, Rainfall is still in development mode and we have an active beta test phase underway. We are a lean, efficient operation and leverage multiple distributed resource bases to enable a faster, more optimized and lower cost structure. 

We raised a pre-seed funding round of approximately $1M, closed in Q3 2021 from high visibility impact and strategic investors across the US, Europe, and the Middle East such as Charly Kleissner (NeXt, Ariba, Toniic, KL Felicitas Foundation) along with Brigitte Mohn (Bertelsmann heir and head of the Bertelsmann Foundation), Doug Lee (D3Jubilee a $3B South Korean Fund), Tharald Nustad (Katapult of Norway) and others. Investors and Businesses who are already excited by the potential of the Raindrop and its value to both buyers and data creators in the Rainfall self-sovereign AI economy have contributed another $1.6M to Rainfall, bringing the total capital we have been able to build from to $2.6M.

We are currently working on a follow-up fundraising round, which continues with the approach of bringing mission-aligned strategic investors and businesses on board to help raise an additional $5M as we prepare to go to market and expand our charter partnerships and our infrastructure to support them.