A few weeks ago, I attended the Web Summit in Lisbon along with our CEO, Louise Burke, where we represented the ODI and presented our project work on Solid. The summit hosted over 70,000 people from around the globe, and almost 3,000 startups participated. In her talk, Louise addressed the issues of Why startups win by building on open standards, and illustrated the experience the ODI has in incubating startups.
Open data for entrepreneurs
Back in 2015, the European Union funded a €7.8 million startup programme called ODINE—the Open Data Incubator for Europe, in which the ODI was one of seven partners, including the University of Southampton, The Guardian and Telefónica. ODINE attracted over 1,000 applications from startups across every EU country, with 57 finally selected and funded, getting up to €100,000 each, equity-free.
By 2020, those companies had generated €110 million in revenue, created 784 new jobs, and attracted €22 million in follow-on private investment. While the programme was fundamentally about open data, a few companies went further, specifically building their businesses around open data published using open standards.
One company, Derilinx, was a small company of four people when they received the ODINE grant in 2015. By 2016, they were heading to €500,000, and by 2018 they were winning national contracts. Today, they manage Ireland's national Open Data Portal at data.gov.ie, with over 21,000 datasets, 140 publishers, from 30 public sector organisations. Their success lay in their strategic decision to work with W3C open standards for Linked Data, created by our co-founder, Sir Tim Berners-Lee.
Open standards and Solid
Over the years, ODI has enabled a range of commercial successes upon open data and open standards – and we are doing it again. This time with personal data and an open standard called Solid. Created by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Solid lets users put all of their online information in one place - in a personal online data store, or Pod - which service providers can then access with permission using apps and AI agents. The data standards used in Solid make user data AI-ready and ready for apps to use without customisation.
For the last year, the Open Data Institute has been stewarding Solid - providing technical and governance support that enables adoption of the technology. Our work includes active standards and open-source software development, developer training and direct support for social-good applications.
Solid can benefit startups in a number of ways. Firstly, your app can access years of user history from day one - imagine launching a health app that already knows three years of fitness patterns, injury history, and seasonal trends based on data already collected from Strava, MyGarminConnect and MyFitnessPal. Secondly, as more apps support Solid, every user's Pod gets more data, and your app automatically benefits from the network effect. As more apps support Solid, every user's Pod gets more data, and your app automatically benefits. Say, a user adds a nutrition app to their Pod. Now, you can correlate diet with performance. Thirdly, the data stays in your users’ Pod, not on your servers. They can revoke access anytime. This can grow trust in an era of huge data breaches.
Another added benefit of Solid is that there is no vendor lock-in. Right now, users are forced to pick just one fitness app, even though no single app is best at everything. MyFitnessPal has the biggest food database, but Cronometer is better for micronutrients. Strava is unbeatable for running routes, but not designed for strength training. Users pick one and get stuck—three years of data makes switching impossible. With Solid, that lock-in disappears. Your fitness data lives in your Pod. Track breakfast in Cronometer, log your run in Strava, open your strength training app - it already sees everything and adjusts your workout accordingly. Here's what this means for founders: users don't have to choose between your app and your competitor's anymore. The total addressable market grows, and customer acquisition costs drop because users try new apps without abandoning their data. And finally, reduced overheads. The combined engineering, legal and compliance costs of managing personal data and identity amount to hundreds of thousands.
What was hot at the Web Summit?
So how does this all fit in with what else we saw at the Web Summit? Vibe coding was a hot-topic, with a main-stage presentation from Lovable, a masterclass from repl.it, and a large stand from Vercel, who now have a Vibe Coding Platform. All of these platforms enable anyone to build a website with just one prompt. At present, most of these platforms suffer the same challenge as traditional websites – your data only exists in the context of a single site. If I want to generate specialised websites for managing my diet, running, and coeliac disease, there is no way of sharing and re-using common data, such as my weight, height and allergens across those platforms. Solid is a natural enabler of out-of-the-box data re-use across such generated websites, and can offer a large amount of value to these platforms. In the Solid community, vibe-coded apps with Solid-capabilities are in development.
There were also a number of organisations working on personalised health and education apps which benefit from longitudinal records. At present, these organisations are doing large amounts of data integration to generate longitudinal learning records, or longitudinal patient records. This is an area in which Solid can significantly reduce the burden on the application developers. The end goal of Solid is to have all of your Web data living in a Pod. The result is a longitudinal record of all of your data, including health, fitness, and educational data, which these applications can then use.
The summit concluded with a fireside chat “Hanging in the balance” with our co-founder Sir Tim Berners-Lee and John Bruce, who is the co-founder of his Solid-based commercial venture, Inrupt. The talk centred around how Solid offers a “reset” for the current Web, re-centring data and end-users rather than service providers, a reset that is of increasing importance in the age of AI. This “reset” will empower the individual and restore the “coolness” of the early web through digital sovereignty, ensuring a web that truly serves humanity.
