Every idea needs a visible origin.
Timestamped provenance and patent-pending watermarking that travel with every paper, dataset, and model input — through downstream use.
A revolution in knowledge has begun.
The world’s best ideas are moving faster than the systems built to protect them. Stoa gives knowledge a trusted path forward — with provenance, permission, and value attached.
The Problem
Knowledge escaped the library. The economics did not.
Research is no longer a static paper on a shelf. It is searched, summarized, trained on, licensed, remixed, and embedded inside new products.
But the people and institutions behind that knowledge still lack a clean way to prove origin, govern use, and share in the value their work creates.
Every use needs a clear permission.
Granular, machine-readable consent for display, indexing, licensing, and AI training. Permission becomes programmable — not buried in a PDF.
Every market needs a fair return.
Royalties that pay the source on every view, download, enterprise license, and API call — the first pricing engine for the knowledge economy.
The old modelFor fifty years a handful of publishers sold universities access to research those same universities produced — and paid the authors nothing. Stoa ends the extraction.
The Opening
The first institutions will set the terms.
The Knowledge Economy will not wait for perfect consensus. It will be shaped by the universities, archives, labs, and cultural institutions willing to define how knowledge is proven, permissioned, and valued.
Stoa Analytics
Set knowledge free. Keep value connected to its source.
Stoa is the trusted front door for provenance, permissions, access, attribution, and value flow.
Team
People building the category.
Stoa brings together operators, investors, researchers, product builders, and strategic operators focused on creating trusted infrastructure for the next era of data ownership, governance, and licensing.
Dr. Charles Lister Smith
Co-Founder & CEO
Dr. Charles Lister Smith is the Co-Founder and CEO of Stoa Analytics.
Dr. Smith is an economist and financial historian, and a leading thinker on speculative bubbles. His doctoral work at the London School of Economics offers a new account of the Great Crash and the onset of the Great Depression that displaces the master narrative of Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz (1963). His current research introduces a reformulation of the Minsky-Kindleberger model to explain the speculative bubble phenomenon.
Dr. Smith spent 15 years on Wall Street investing across the capital structure, of which half was spent at J.P. Morgan in their Special Investments and Private Equity groups.
He holds a PhD, MPhil, and MSc in Economic History from the London School of Economics, an MBA from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, and a BA in History from Colgate University.
Steven Amato
Co-Founder
Steven Amato is an entrepreneur, operator, and strategic builder focused on transforming emerging technologies into scalable platforms and real-world businesses.
As Founder and CEO of Contend, Steven has built and led ventures across storytelling, immersive technology, AI, enterprise innovation, and next-generation digital infrastructure.
At Stoa, Steven leads product strategy, platform positioning, go-to-market development, and institutional narrative design. He helps shape the company’s vision as a new kind of research repository built for the AI era.
Pawel Papkala
Product Architecture / AI Workflow / Platform Buildout
Pawel leads technical execution across product architecture, secure workflow, demo development, reporting layers, and AI-assisted platform buildout.
He brings the build discipline behind the system: turning complex data, provenance, and workflow requirements into usable infrastructure.
Andrea Sellon
Operating / Partnerships / Investor Process
Andrea drives investor materials, partner outreach, project management, and go-to-market coordination.
She helps keep strategy, execution, partnerships, and investor-facing materials aligned as Stoa moves from thesis to platform.
Tarek Shoeb
Board Member
Tarek Shoeb holds a B.A. from The American University in Cairo and an MBA from Harvard Business School.
Across his career, Tarek has held senior roles at Goldman Sachs, One Equity Partners, Cerberus, Vitol, and global infrastructure investment groups, with experience spanning healthcare, industrials, medtech, energy, finance, logistics, and large-scale strategic investments.
He brings deep expertise in institutional finance, operational scaling, transaction structuring, and global capital markets.
At Stoa, Tarek advises on strategic growth, enterprise partnerships, institutional capital formation, and long-term platform development.
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An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.Victor Hugo
A Revolution in Knowledge