The Value of Data: A Conversation With Jürgen Kleeberger

Right now, somewhere on a server, a company knows your income bracket, your eating habits, your media consumption, and whether you’re price-sensitive. Your weather app tracked your GPS coordinates so precisely it could tell which room of which building you were sitting in. Amazon has every voice command you’ve ever given Alexa, stored and analyzed. And Rewe has you categorized as an A-customer with a predicted lifetime value.

You generated all of that data. You’re getting exactly zero of the value from it. Jürgen Kleeberger thinks that’s absurd. And he’s building a cooperative to change it.

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The Road to Building a Data Cooperative

Jürgen’s path to founding REEF Data is not a straight line. He’s been a digital product developer for over 30 years, built the WIRED app for Condé Nast Germany, studied media informatics in Furtwangen when CD-ROM production was cutting edge, and originally wanted to be a musician.

The pivot toward impact came from a place of devastation. During the 2015 refugee crisis, the photo of Alan Kurdi, the three-year-old who drowned trying to cross the Mediterranean, hit Jürgen the way it hit millions of people. But instead of moving on, he started shifting his focus to projects that bring about something positive for society. First, a project with the UN exploring how people could be paid for learning instead of paying to learn. Then blockchain-based digital economies. Then, through the network those projects created, he met the people who would become his co-founders: Alois Krittel from the Artificial Center Hamburg, and Jochen, a 70-year-old cooperative veteran with decades of experience in genossenschaftliche governance. The question that connected them all: What if the people who generate data were the ones who benefit from it?

What REEF Actually Does

REEF Data is built on a simple premise that happens to be legally enforceable: your data belongs to you. Under the EU Data Act and GDPR, companies are required to give you your data when you ask for it. Most people never ask. REEF makes asking easy. Through the REEF app, you can request your data from companies like Amazon, Rewe, or Volkswagen. The data arrives on your phone, locally stored. REEF never sees it. The app then visualizes what would otherwise be thousands of incomprehensible JSON files into something you can actually understand: your spending patterns, your top products, how the company categorizes you, what they think they know about you.

That’s step one: awareness. Step two is where it gets interesting. If you choose to, you can share anonymized portions of your data into the cooperative’s data pool. Not all of it, only specific datasets where there’s an actual buyer. The data gets anonymized so thoroughly that even REEF can’t trace it back to you, and it’s hosted by Adruvia, the IT infrastructure provider for every cooperative bank in Germany.

Then REEF finds buyers. Right now, that means advertisers and market research firms who currently buy this kind of data from brokers operating in massive gray markets. The difference: with REEF, the data is ethically sourced, the user consented explicitly, and 50% of the revenue goes back to the person who generated it..

Why a Cooperative and Not a Startup

This is the part of the conversation where Jürgen’s conviction comes through most clearly. REEF Data is structured as a Genossenschaft (cooperative). Not a GmbH. Not a VC-backed startup. A cooperative with a capital market lock. The reasoning is structural, not ideological. If REEF were a GmbH, a larger company could acquire it. Ten million euros on the table and suddenly the data pool that was supposed to belong to the users is back in the hands of the same companies it was taken from. A cooperative can’t be sold. Changing its bylaws requires 93% of member votes. The data pool stays protected regardless of what happens to the market around it.

Jürgen is honest about the trade-off: cooperatives are slower to steer, harder to pivot, and more complex to govern than a traditional startup. But for a product built entirely on trust, where the core asset is sensitive personal data, he argues there’s no alternative structure that offers the same level of protection. The Volksbank Hamburg is invested and has a board member on REEF’s Aufsichtsrat. The Genossenschaftsverband is a partner. Through Germany’s cooperative network, REEF has theoretical access to 30 million cooperative members. As Jürgen’s co-founder Jochen puts it: if the cooperatives can’t make this work, nobody can.

The €140,000 Amazon Customer and Your Weather App

The most visceral moments in this episode are the data stories. Jürgen has seen what companies actually store about their customers, and the details are startling. Amazon doesn’t just know what you bought. It maintains a structured profile categorizing your income bracket, your interests, your media habits, and your predicted purchasing behavior. One user in REEF’s early testing discovered they had spent €140,000 on Amazon over the years. Amazon never showed them that number. Rewe categorizes you as price-sensitive or price-insensitive, assigns you a customer value rating, and maps your upselling potential. Your weather app, the one you think is harmless, was tracking your GPS coordinates at resolution high enough to pinpoint which room of a building you were in, and selling that data globally.

None of this is illegal. All of it is in the terms you clicked “agree” to. REEF’s argument: if the data exists regardless, you should at least know what it says and have the option to benefit from it.

What’s Next: Local AI on Your Phone

REEF is building something that goes beyond data retrieval and monetization. They’ve prototyped a local AI that runs directly on your phone, analyzing your aggregated data without ever sending it to a cloud. Imagine: a personal assistant that can look across your Amazon purchases, your Rewe shopping data, your energy usage from Danfoss, and your mobility patterns, and give you genuinely useful advice. Not to sell you something. To help you.

That digital twin of you, built from data you retrieved from dozens of companies, is something no single tech company has. Not even Amazon. Because no one company has all the pieces. But you do, once you pull them together. And when tens of thousands of people do the same thing inside a cooperative structure, the collective dataset becomes extraordinarily valuable for research, for urban planning, for public health, for understanding how society actually works.

The app is live. You can download it now at REEF.coop. The cooperative is onboarding its first members. Jürgen says 40,000 users is the break-even point. Given that his cooperative partners have access to 30 million members, it’s a milestone that feels within reach.

Listen to the full episode here! 👉 Spotify | Apple

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