Big Tech has a chokehold on online business and innovation. Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft have created five private hubs for commerce, analytics and machine learning – massive operations powered by the systematic harvesting of consumer data.

There are 31.7 million businesses in America: 99.9% of them are small. When the playing field is level, all businesses have a fair shot at becoming big. But the playing field is not level.


Lacking actionable knowledge about consumer purchase behaviors, most businesses have no option but to share their revenues with Big Tech in the form of advertising dollars, listing fees and app store commissions. In all but name, this is a Knowledge Tax that businesses pay to the Big Five for the insights they hold on consumer intent.

The rise of Artificial Intelligence further consolidates the advantage of the Tech Giants. Training AI requires huge data concentrations that are centralized in the hands of the Big Five. Such is the monopolistic power of Big Tech that AI is already largely being outsourced to them: businesses are able to license AI models from Google, Amazon, and Microsoft-backed OpenAI. The subscription fee they pay is in all but name a Data Tax.

Richard Branson once famously said that every “big business starts small”. Our mission is to give every business its fair shot at becoming big.