June 28th, 2018 at 7:35 pm UTC · 4 mins read
The two founders of COVA have been active members of the crypto community since 2014. They are also experts in data and AI technologies.
Vincent Li, a Harvard College alumnus, ran a BTC hedge fund in 2014 and then joined the hot 16z startup Gigster. Gigster created the first successful token system that incentivizes freelancer software engineers.
Raymond Gao, a PhD dropout of Princeton University, is an expert in data science technologies. He is an early investor of 3 successful big data and internet security companies: Seven Bridges Genomics, Conjur, and a financial big data company.
The Internet (TCP/IP protocol) defined how data should be transferred, however it neglected to define how data should be utilized.
In 2017, an estimated 22 ZB of data was produced but only 1% was ever utilized.
The two founders decided that it was time to create a data utilization protocol that will eventually bring together the world’s data into a shared data network.
An ‘Amazon for Data’ or a ‘World Database’, whilst not an exact description is an easy-to-grasp summarization of what the founders are trying to achieve.
Consider this scenario: you are a medical researcher that wants to find out the relationship between diabetes and exercise habits.
Under internet protocol, you would need patients to send you their medical and activity records, both of which are highly private information. You would soon find that nobody is willing to share this kind of information with you.
Under the COVA protocol, however, the raw patient records are hidden and only summary information is provided to the researchers (privacy preservation technology). The patients are also compensated by the researcher for contributing data (data attribution technology).
Data will become a commodity.
Users can then effortlessly sell their stream of location, browsing, medical, social network data for hundreds of dollars per month, without compromising privacy. Currently, the profits in this data are being unfairly captured by internet platform companies like Google and Facebook.
Scalability, privacy and data attribution technologies are still immature in main stream block chain projects like Ethereum but COVA has a practical technical design based on Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) to solve these problems.
Raymond and Vincent named the project COVA (COVALENT.AI), as in the chemical covalent bond since the project will connect data into a network.
Their mission has attracted top talent from around the world to join the team.
A Goldman Sachs, Ebay and Harvard alumnus, Tarik Moon, was visiting family and friends in Bangladesh when the founders called him up to tell him about the project. He booked a plane ticket to join them the next week.
The team quickly expanded to include a Stanford grad and early employee of Snapchat, a former engineering manager at Doordash and alumni from Harvard, Google, Amazon, Princeton and Microsoft.
COVA’s advisers include the Founder of FBG Capital (Mr. Zhou Shuoji), an early investor of Bitfinex (Mr. Tian Jia), the Crypto Partner at ZhenFund (Mr. Dai Yusen), and an Assistant Professor at Princeton University (Mrs. Wang Mengdi).
Data deficiency has long been the shackle of weak AI.
Raymond and Vincent are confident that massive amounts of data will start to aggregate onto the COVA block chain from the medical sector, transportation, finance, social media and most other industries. They believe that the success of COVA will directly lead to the success of weak AI.
Because of its mission-driven culture, COVA has managed to attract and retain some of the most talented coders and prodigy hackers in the world. Most of the engineering team have won awards in ACM, the IOI competition and/or have worked at some of the best technologies firms in the world including Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Amazon and eBay.
COVA has one of the strongest team and investor lineups for 2018.
COVA (COVALENT.AI) has closed multi-million dollar investment deals respectively with FBG Capital, ZhenFund, Metropolis VC, IOST/Bluehill, and Node Capital.
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