Investing in DLP Labs
A new model for data brokerage
Hey everyone,
We’re excited to announce that we've invested in DLP Labs, a startup building an onchain "Data as a Service (DaaS)" platform — a protocol that lets people mine value from something they already generate: their data.
The Original Sin of the Digital Economy
There's something fundamentally broken about today's data landscape. You produce valuable financial, purchase, and behavioral data every day. Big tech and financial institutions harvest it, monetize it to the tune of billions, and you get... what exactly?
Nothing. Your data is treated like exhaust when it should be treated like an asset.
DLP Labs uses crypto rewards to build commercially valuable data products. Their first product, Driver, enables fleets and drivers to sell subscriptions to their cars' data. They launched last week and have 6,352 connected cars sharing data, with ~200 new drivers and fleets signing up per day. They plan to enrich the data product to make it more valuable for autonomous driving companies and auto insurance who pay for the data.
From Bitcoin Mining to Data Mining
What makes DLP Labs particularly compelling is their mental model: what if we applied the same incentive structures that drove the explosion of Bitcoin mining to data?
It's a fascinating parallel. Bitcoin mining incentivized people to contribute computing resources to a network. DLP Labs is creating incentives for people to contribute valuable data to their network. By doing so, users earn $DLP tokens (80% of data sales revenue flows back to contributors) for the data they're already generating.
Vehicle Data: The First Big Opportunity
The starting point is vehicle telemetry data. The numbers here are staggering: a $250B projected total addressable market by 2030. Energy companies, auto insurers, smart cities (DOT), charging networks, self-driving companies, and AI developers all need this data and are willing to pay for it.
On the demand side, DLP has already secured letters of intent from companies who want to subscribe to their telemetry data for AI-driven battery optimization and compliance initiatives before even launching. On the supply side, they’ve partnered with DePin platform DIMO for a dead-simple user experience. DLP will be onboard rental car companies, taxi drivers, ride sharing companies, and everyone with a car or fleet that wants to transform their cars’ data into an asset.
In the Driver’s Seat
The DLP Labs founding team brings serious credibility to this vision. Ryan Kuhel (CEO) has managed $1B+ in advertising at Meta and Microsoft and shipped product at Polygon, Riot Games, and Dow Jones. Sameer Chauhan (CTO) brings engineering experience from Polygon Labs, Riot Games, Dow Jones, and Cooper Union.
This isn't a team of theorists — these are builders who have delivered at scale across both web2 and web3. They understand the intricacies of data monetization, advertising technology, and crypto incentive mechanisms.
Why We Believe This Works Now
Data monetization isn't a new concept, but several factors make this the right time for DLP Labs' approach:
The AI data hunger is real — As models grow more sophisticated, high-quality training data becomes the bottleneck. DLP sits at the intersection of data collection and AI model training.
Web3 infrastructure has matured — The technical stack to build secure, scalable data protocols with proper incentives exists today in a way it didn't five years ago.
Data sovereignty awareness is growing — People increasingly understand their data has value and expect compensation for it.
Emerging markets are crypto-native — The regions DLP targets already show strong adoption of similar earning models.
New Privacy-Enabled Monetization Strategies — using onchain privacy techniques (like FHE) they can charge subscriptions for queries instead of packaging data for one-off sales
Drill, Baby, Drill
What gets us most excited is the long-term vision. Vehicle data is just the start. Once DLP Labs establishes this model, they can expand to other high-value data types needed for AI training. They're not just building a business; they're pioneering a fundamental shift in how value flows in the data economy — from a one-way extraction model to a two-way value exchange where individuals participate in the upside of their digital lives.
There’s also an opportunity to re-architect the data broker business model. Historically, data brokers sell a dataset and it’s “one and done.” Once the customer has the data, the value has been transferred. There’s an opportunity to use novel encrypted schemes (like FHE) to keep data private while in use. Without divulging the underlying data, data consumers can query the encrypted dataset and still get a response — this could dramatically shift the business model from a packaged “snapshot” of data to API-based pricing for queries on encrypted data. Collect once, sell over and over.
In a world where we're constantly told "data is the new oil," DLP Labs is making sure that the people generating that resource actually benefit from the boom.
Come chat with Unit VC on X: Kyle & Rand or have a look at our portfolio here.
Drive a car? Sign-up for DLP Labs here and put your data to work.
Follow DLP Labs Founder Ryan and his journey onboarding 50K cars and beyond!