There’s been a lot of talk about the staggering growth of Big Data in the world, with some experts saying the amount of data stored on servers across the globe is increasing at an exponential rate, practically doubling as each year passes us by.

That may be so, but in Third World countries with poorly developed infrastructures, there’s still a distinct lack of up-to-the minute data in many walks of life, and that means businesses and governments alike are missing out on all kinds of insights.

Enter Premise Data Corp. to try and fix that. Premise, a San Francisco-based startup, has come up with a rather novel way to try gain access to economic data in emerging markets – it pays people to access the GPS systems and cameras on their smartphones, gathers up valuable data and packages it, then sells it on governments and bodies like the World Bank.

It’s a model that’s attracted a lot of venture capitalist attention, and now the company has just announced a $50 million funding round by SpaceX and Tesla investor Valor Equity Partners. Previous investor Social+Capital also participated, bringing Premise’s total funding to $67 million.

Premise doesn’t just gather any old data. It’s focused on so-called ‘economic data’, monitoring the price and availability of foods and other products in more than 30 countries across Asia, Latin America, the U.S. and Europe.

Premise gathers its data from both e-commerce sites and traditional brick and mortar stores. Data from e-commerce sites can be scooped up using relatively simple software, but for the latter, Premise has recruited a legion of local people to act as its agents. These agents go around supermarkets and stores snapping photos of food items, cigarettes and other products using their smartphones. They then upload this data, along with information about the product’s availability and price, to Premise’s database. Premise rewards its agents with payment of around $100 to $120 a month.

This type of data has been available since before Premise was around, but the problem is the government indexes that log this kind of information are often weeks or months out of date, explained David Soloff, co-founder of Premise, in an interview with Fortune.

Premise sells its up-to-date economic data to customers in the banking sector, which like to monitor price fluctuations and goods availability in different countries around the world.

The insights Premise’s data provides can often be quite profound. For example, last April, Premise was able to identify what it calls “savage deflation” in Southern China, months before the Chinese government noticed it, Soloff told The Financial Times.

Now, fresh with a $50 million cash injection, Premise is looking to employ more engineering staff so it can amass even more data and build up a historical dataset of price information that will hopefully give us a better picture of the state of the world’s economies.

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