Kristi Mansfield is CEO of Seer Data & Analytics, a company that recognises the importance of data, and how it can be harnessed to identify problems and drive solutions.
What does your business do, and who are your customers?
Seer Data & Analytics is a civic tech company turning data into action for people creating a better world.
We are bridging the data divide by democratising data access, data sharing, and storytelling so that people of all skillsets can engage in problem-solving to benefit society.
Our users are organisations that build and deliver strategies for people and places: community organisations, not-for-profits, collaboratives, businesses and all levels of government.
Seer is a data sharing platform that brings together Open Data, data that’s been shared from data stewards, AI-generated Smart Insights, Seer’s machine learning developed datasets, self-service data ingestion tools to create local ‘Data Spaces’ – all in a single problem-solving platform.
What’s your mission?
Our mission is to make data accessible, usable, and shareable for people of all skillsets. Our vision is to be the world’s problem-solving platform for local communities.
What does it mean to you, to be a ‘social enterprise’?
Data access and sharing is critical for better local and community-led decision-making. When communities have access to data it shifts traditional power structures in society.
The Seer Data platform is in more than 35 communities around Australia, helping to drive data-led decision-making to transform communities, giving people more agency and sovereignty over their futures, and the ability to improve service delivery impact and efficiencies to improve lives.
Can you scale a mission? Are there challenges around growing your business, while also staying committed to your impact thesis?
Our mission is to make data accessible, usable and sharable for people of all skillsets. We scale our mission by giving our customers the best experience of using data to solve problems in the Seer platform.
Our challenge is to scale the trust our customers have in us to be the platform to share their data. To ensure we continue to earn and maintain the trust we have with our customers, we continue to build and refine the platform, which includes a rich feature set for users to manage and control data sharing, data ownership and sovereignty, privacy, data storytelling and data pipeline management. We have also launched the Seer Learning Lab to continuously build the data literacy of our customers and their partners, delivering value and capability so that organisations can undertake data sharing and data storytelling themselves.
How have you seen investor sentiment change over the past 5 years, when it comes to recognising the value (or cost) of being mission-led?
Our investors have backed us to execute on our mission and be a commercially driven business. More and more investors want to back global companies that are mission-led and have a plan to achieve high growth and a path to profitability.
Was there a business (either local or globally) that influenced the development of your organisation?
We are inspired by data.world, a US-based global leader in the data catalogue sector and company that has raised $135m. We are pleased Seer is complimentary to data.world’s offering which provides us with partnering and commercial opportunities through our relationship with them.
What’s in store for your business in 2022
To build new product and data features in our data sharing platform that makes it even easier for people of all skillsets to bring in their own data to Seer, share it with others, and tell data stories.
We’re also aiming to secure our first customers in Texas, and expand into new States from the US. And plan to double the size of our product and sales team.
And, we’ll close a funding round of $4M to fund our growth.
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