News

March 1, 2023

Berlin-based SaaS Polyteia raises €5m to speed up government decision-making

The govtech will use the money to expand in Europe in 2024


Polyteia

When governments want to make decisions on social planning, budgeting or any other number of things, they often have to wade through mountains of data — some of which is stored in non-digital databases — to come to the right conclusion. This process is not only slow, but can create errors. 

Berlin-based govtech Polyteia  — which has just raised €5m in late seed funding from HV Capital, with participation from the German early-stage VC firm DvH Ventures — wants to solve this problem. It follows another round raised on different terms in October 2022.  

The company’s cloud-based platform helps public administrators and politicians organise and analyse data more efficiently to help them make faster, and more data-driven, decisions. 

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Currently, 80 government entities in Germany use Polyteia, and the company plans to roll out the platform to governments in wider Europe in 2024. 

What does Polyteia do?

Faruk Tuncer, cofounder of Polyteia, explains that when policy advisers are told to create reports to make data-based decisions, they are “faced with a large landscape of data silos from different administrative legacy systems and registers.” Data is usually compiled by sending files over email and piecing it together in Excel, which is typically very time consuming, he says. 

Polyteia compiles all the data from these different silos, allowing policy advisers to access relevant information when they need it. It charges users an annual fee for use of the platform.

An example of where Polyteia is used by local governments is in kindergarten planning: “cities and towns need to monitor and forecast population development to predict how many spots will be needed in the future,” says Tuncer. 

Another use case is in the cybersecurity staffing of large public authorities. IT departments use Polyteia to track and analyse the source of threats over time and assess where attacks are concentrated in order to assign staff accordingly. 

Despite the fact that companies need to go through procurement processes when selling to governments, persuading governments to work with Polyteia has been relatively smooth, says Tuncer. Governments are “very pain aware” he says, and are looking for solutions to make working with data easier.

“We rely on framework contracts and on cooperation with IT service providers, as well as public sector consultancies and service firms, to accelerate decision-making and the process” of sales, he says. 

Polyteia is also, according to Tuncer, the only end-to-end data platform for governments that is “based on cloud infrastructure, open sources its core and is based in the European Union.”

Future plans

So far, Polyteia has built infrastructure that helps governments to “create and maintain data spaces for different domains, such as demographic data or financial data,” says Tuncer. Now, it wants to expand its capabilities so that customers — for example, public sector IT consultancies — can “build and deliver” data projects based on Polyteia’s platform.

It also wants to create more no-code tools so that government employees who don’t have any data training can compile their own data reports. 

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Tuncer thinks that Polyteia will become even more important to governments as they face vast challenges with war, refugee migration and climate change. 

“With Polyteia, local, state and national governments can gather and analyse data on energy consumption, geological features and weather patterns to decide on their energy infrastructure,” says Tuncer. 

They can also use Polyteia to track and predict the registration of refugees in the government system, to provide appropriate shelter and social services to them.

Miriam Partington

Miriam Partington is a reporter at Sifted. She covers the DACH region and the future of work, and coauthors Startup Life , a weekly newsletter on what it takes to build a startup. Follow her on X and LinkedIn