DareData is a Data and Artificial Intelligence consulting company working mostly for data-driven clients, whether enterprises or startups. Our mission is to democratize data and AI tools as we feel there is current imbalance in accessibility. We work to provide autonomous paths for every client to access and control data engineering and data science tools by building infrastructure and AI analytics and models.

We are almost reaching our two-year mark in an organic and sustainable growth process - no external investment, no debt, no hype. Despite COVID-19, we grew more than 300% in 2020, expanding to new clients from Portugal, the UK, Germany, the US, and Belgium. In a short amount of time, we achieved a lot: we have built an extraordinary data and AI team only compared with the best I’ve ever hoped to work with; a strong marketing strategy; a client portfolio in a wide range of sectors, from pharma, beverages, banking, telco, the tech startup world, and even the public sector.

We’ve created data infrastructures and data pipelines that are the building blocks of our clients’ data initiatives. Furthermore, on the AI side, we’ve created and deployed sophisticated and reliable machine learning models.

We are extremely proud of what we have learned and accomplished in such a small amount of time. However, this is not the point that we are most proud of: because our values have been created from our hearts, we ended up developing something special because we intentionally started with a naïve approach. We assumed that it was possible to provide a path to a personalized definition of happiness to everyone that works with us. It seems almost a cliché, right? Well, in our case, not really: we do expect to deliver a solid ground to achieve personalized happiness. Let me give you some practical examples of things we do differently:

1. We are pragmatically transparent:

  • We share every project contract and every contract detail with everyone involved whenever legally possible
  • Everybody knows everybody rates, salaries, and bonuses
  • We clearly state our individual objectives as partners

2. We respect people:

  • We reject projects that are boring and/or meaningless, that is, projects that will not produce real value to the client and lead our team to frustration and/or boredom;
  • We don’t have an office space: we are fully remote (even pre-COVID19) and geographically spread over the World. Everyone can work when and where they want;
  • We don't ask for exclusivity and don't tie people to contracts that may disable them to experience or even create other projects. People are free and even incentivized to have their own personal projects and side-gigs;
  • We give responsibility to people: they are the delivery channel of their work;
  • We pay way above average;

3. We aim for a premium level technical organization with an amazing attitude:

  • We wish to build a superb technical team that delivers premium value
  • Everybody within the organization speaks data tech language, partners included: we do code reviews and commits, and we aim to keep it like that
  • People should learn, teach, and be positively challenged all the time
  • We also don’t work with the proverbial "tech rockstar" because we've seen how corrosive attitudes destroy teams

4. Finally, we strongly advocate for ethics in data.

Now that we have grown a little based on these principles we look at other consulting companies and we see ourselves as different: we work with the best data scientists and data engineers out there - our team is just astounding - and we don’t have problems onboarding them. Our projects are so exciting that we, the partners, would love to dive into them: challenges like building AI models to help to find cancer cells; like forecasting large retail company sales across the whole country; or building a conceptual data and analytics infrastructure to help Portuguese companies to export. It is as it seems: we provide fun blended with purpose and we're growing a premium business with it.

We have more coming up. Follow us in 2021! If you have any questions or suspect you aren't using your data in the most effective way possible feel free to get in touch with me at nuno@daredata.engineering.