Carrying your smartphone around everywhere has become a way of life. In doing so, you produce a surprising amount of data about your role in the economy—where you shop, work, travel, and generally hang out.

Thasos Group, founded at MIT in 2011, has developed a platform that leverages those data, in anonymized and aggregated form, to measure economies for industry and investors.

Thasos’s platform—based on MIT Media Lab research by co-founders Wei Pan and Alex “Sandy” Pentland—crunches anonymized location data from hundreds of millions of mobile phones daily, extracting notable consumption, employment, and living behaviors.

“We process up to 3 to 5 terabytes of data per day and use that data to measure economic activities, such as how many people visit a store or a commercial property, how many people go to work or travel, and how many man-hours are spent in a factory,” says Pan, Thasos’ chief scientist.

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