22. Tanuvi Ethunandan

Company: Data Duopoly

Website: https://www.dataduopoly.com/

Business: Visitor flow management products and footfall trackers that show where your visitors are on-site in real time, disperse crowds to quieter areas and can prevent bottlenecks before they occur.

 

About Tanuvi and Data Duopoly

Data Duopoly was started by Tanuvi and co-founder Erin Morris in 2019, with a mission to revolutionise the visitor experience in any venue worldwide.

The idea for Data Duopoly was formed when they were frustrated with the queues and bottlenecks at visitor attractions, due to the uninformative, lacklustre and environmentally unfriendly paper maps.

In addition, the lack of data around how visitors interacted with the site, inhibited future planning for venues and they wanted to address this. Tanuvi wanted to transform how venues manage visitor flow.

 

 

Coming from a data background, being a Chartered Accountant at EY in London, and an Economics graduate from Cambridge University, Tanuvi wanted to use the power of data and AI to improve the visitor experience. From there, XplorIT, their white label solution sold to venues, was created. Tanuvi and Erin piloted with the Eden Project, which receives over 1m visitors a year, and proved that they could use personalised incentives to “nudge” visitors away from the crowds.

Tanuvi commented that “Having two non-technical founders was a challenge, however we saw this as a hidden advantage, because we approached problems driven by the best possible user experience, and then sought tech to make this happen, rather than thinking of the easiest technical solution.

We managed to onboard technical advisors who helped us with our strategy and worked with some fantastic contractors. Just as we were ready to go to market, Covid hit. As many businesses, we had to quickly adapt. We embraced remote working, and saw potential to use our technology to help venues understand visitor movements on a much wider scale and specifically in universities.”

During Covid-19 Data Duopoly secured their first paying client the National Trust Cornish Tin Coast partnership which kickstarted their growth plans. Data Duopoly then closed their £250k seed round which was backed by the European Space Agency, Aerospace Cornwall and angels, which enabled them to triple their team. From there, they secured a pilot with Falmouth University to help students and staff return to campus safely.

Tanuvi and the team have ambitious plans for the next year, aiming to scale into 20 new visitor attraction sites and 5 university campuses by the start of the next academic year. They have just launched their ‘avocado’ (large seed) fundraising round to achieve their goals.

 

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