[vasaulys]

This seems to confirm just how important the price of data is for ML & AI based startups. Methinks there is a market alone for data companies, not even those that are necessarily doing anything productive with said data, just collecting it.

Also raises the question of whether its possible to bootstrap a data science, ML, or AI startup, given the high expense of purchasing that data.

[unsettledtck]

There is actually a thriving industry in data collection and these range from companies that provide tools for you to do your own data collection and those who will collect the data for you (or provide pre-made datasets). Full disclosure, I work for one such: Scrapinghub where we provide tools, platform, and data services.

[abstractbeliefs]

But surely we already know that there's a huge market for information storage. Cartographers are the big ones, who can produce maps to sell to the public, but also often produce custom excerpts of their datasets for building planning surveys, etc.

The other group are information brokers, like those behind credit check firms who again mainly exist to collect and sell data.

[AznHisoka]

By collecting it you mean scraping?