Accenture has made a strategic investment through Accenture Ventures in Inrupt, an enterprise software company co-founded by world wide web founder, Sir Tim Berners-Lee.
Inrupt aims to help people, organizations and app developers overcome the issue of siloed data. The company’s Enterprise Solid Server platform – based on Berners-Lee’s open-source web technology, Solid – enables businesses and governments to offer consumers and citizens personal data vaults, which bring together and store data from multiple, disconnected sources in a web standard format and allow individuals to decide which data to share across applications and services.
Inrupt is now a part of Accenture Ventures’ Project Spotlight, an engagement and investment program that connects emerging technology software start-ups with the Global 2000 to fill strategic innovation gaps.
Project Spotlight offers access to Accenture’s domain expertise and its enterprise clients, helping start-ups harness human creativity and deliver on the promise of their technology.
Tom Lounibos, managing director of Accenture Ventures, said: “Our investment in Inrupt demonstrates our commitment to helping our clients rethink their technology architectures and source new solutions. Inrupt can help empower users and businesses alike to transform the traditional one-way experience of data ownership into a more collaborative experience at scale across multiple sources, which is increasingly important as companies begin developing a metaverse strategy.”
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, co-founder of Inrupt, said: “Thirty-three years after the birth of the world wide web, Inrupt is delivering on my original vision of a web of shared benefit, for everyone. With Solid, our potent open-source technology, we are working to create a new internet era by putting individuals in control of their data, giving organizations new opportunities to create value for customers, and allowing developers to thrive in an open marketplace of innovation.”
John Bruce, Inrupt’s co-founder and CEO, added: “Users and organizations alike are frustrated by the current dynamics of digital data, but it doesn’t need to be this way. We have the technology to share securely, and we have the tools to put people in control of their own data and to allow organizations and developers to access that data when users allow it — when it benefits both sides. Good for the individual and equally valuable to the organization.”
Terms of the investment were not disclosed.
