News27.10.2021
GovTech? For sure! We invest millions in Polyteia
Dieter von Holtzbrinck Ventures (DvH Ventures) is investing a seven-figure sum in Berlin-based GovTech startup Polyteia. Other investors in the seed round include family office Bool Capital. Polyteia is a SaaS and data startup for the public sector that simplifies and accelerates the decision-making process in public administration at the local, state and federal levels.
Polyteia offers public authorities a modular control platform that accesses data available in different places and intelligently aggregates and displays it. The platform consists of four subproducts.
Polyteia Transform: Data silos of individual authorities or departments are dissolved with a data interface, existing data is integrated, cleaned and prepared ready for analysis;
Polyteia Report: data is analyzed, interpreted and then presented in a user-friendly dashboard;
Polyteia Forecast: Based on the data, case-specific forecasts are made, such as on the demographic development of a city;
Polyteia Publish: The most important data is prepared for the general public and published in comprehensible formats.
Polyteia provides public authorities with a data infrastructure that allows them to improve and accelerate their decision-making capabilities. For example, real-time data from different departments such as health protection, schools and social welfare can be linked. Until now, data silos have mostly prevented rapid decision-making, as existing data can only be manually processed, aggregated and contextualized. There is simply not enough staff to take on the task of making quick decisions.
The increasing staff shortage in the public sector as well as the broad EU data protection directives and digitization strategies are a favorable environment for Polyteia to rapidly expand across Europe. The control platform offers the Public Sector a secure and easy-to-use solution to address exactly these current challenges. As the only end-to-end solution on the European market, Polyteia has a large head start over potential competitors in terms of time and, most importantly, technology, and can build on a scalable business model with an effective sales strategy. In addition, the management team has years of experience and high expertise in the dynamically growing area of Goverment Technology and contributes with its products to strengthening the technological capabilities and sovereignty of the state, administration and democracy in Germany.
Polyteia's existing customers include the cities of Solingen and Goslar, and the states of Berlin and Schleswig-Holstein. For example, the Ministry of Education in Schleswig-Holstein uses Polyteia to decide which schools to close due to the Covid-19 infection situation. A manual evaluation of the daily reporting of infection numbers by all schools in the state would not allow for a reasonably rapid response by the state.
Our goal with Polyteia is to build the leading control platform for the public sector in Europe and thereby contribute to faster and better decisions at all levels of administration. With DvH Ventures and Bool Capital, we have gained strong partners who will support us with capital, reach and technical expertise to further expand our platform and make it available to other countries in Europe.
Polyteia was founded by Faruk Tuncer in cooperation with the Berlin-based company studio Bonum Ventures. Faruk Tuncer (Founder & CEO) was previously an officer in the strategy department of the German Christian Democratic Union (CDU), where he was responsible for local politics. He holds a Bachelor of Arts from the Free University of Berlin and a Master of Public Policy from the Hertie School of Governance. In addition, Faruk Tuncer is a member of the talent committee at the social enterprise JoinPolitics, where he is involved in promoting young political talent, as well as in the "2hearts" initiative, which promotes cultural diversity in the tech scene of tomorrow.