Local governments collect a lot of data, but they aren’t always great at organizing and using it efficiently. Instead of letting useful municipal insights sit around in disparate databases, some not even digital, Berlin-based Polyteia proposes a platform that would allow city leaders to unify and analyze the data that represents the constituents that they serve.

TechCrunch spoke with Polyteia co-founders Faruk Tuncer and Taisia Antonova (CEO and CPO, respectively) at Disrupt Berlin 2018, where they are competing in the Startup Battlefield, and heard a bit more about the platform, who it’s designed for and why. The company was also created with the help of a third co-founder, lead Polyteia architect Lukas Rambold. For the project, Tuncer will bring his experience working in city governments to bear, while Antonova provides expertise on the product side. Antonova is a TechCrunch Battlefield veteran, having pitched IO onstage in London back in 2014.

Polyteia’s platform is designed to serve the mayor’s office and city council alike, with a modular topic-specific system that lets cities (and towns) choose bits of its smart governance platform à la carte. The goal is to bring together legacy data stored in various systems into a central location. “It’s trapped in silos,” Tuncer said. “It takes a lot of time to aggregate that data.” Polyteia also offers to digitize data for clients that might still be stuck with some paper systems.

That modular design means that Polyteia plans to collect and glean insight on everything from local fire departments and housing projects to schools and childcare. The company began its pilot product, now operating, with a childcare module that allows local governments to track kindergarten needs and utilization numbers, making it possible to identify areas that might need expanded services.

In the town of Oranienburg, Head of Central Services Department Mike Wedel is using Polyteia to figure out childcare needs and lauds how with Polyteia “reports are generated at the fingertip.” Angelika Kerstenski, treasurer of the City of Wriezen and chairwoman of the Association of Treasurers in Brandenburg, had similar praise for its work with the new platform. “Polyteia transforms financial and operational data into KPIs and provides forecasts,” Kerstenski said. “Those enable me to control effectively and strategically, without any extra effort.”

The company’s second module, which Polyteia calls a “logical next step,” will be schools. The company is in talks with two German cities about rolling out its school modules now. Polyteia’s business is subscription based, with an activation fee between €5,000 and €50,000 and an annual license fee between €10,000 and €40,000, depending on the size of the project. 

Aware of the sensitive nature of the data it will handle, Polyteia’s platform will receive only anonymized, aggregated data from its clients, complying with privacy laws and negating any potential risk. Beyond privacy concerns, Polyteia notes that many govtech companies struggle to “crack the European market” due to the fragmented nature and heterogeneous needs of different countries, but with some expertise in governance it doesn’t expect to meet the same resistance.

So far, Polyteia’s partner cities have been pleasantly surprised with a startup’s approach to their own data hassles. The company boasts three paying clients to date. “They’re quite impressed with our speed,” Antonova said.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Polyteia launches to help European city governments put their data to work

Meet Spin Analytics, a startup that wants to leverage artificial intelligence to automatically write credit risk modeling regulation reports. The company is participating in Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin.

If you work for a big bank, you know how painful it can be to launch a new product. Every time you start selling a new asset, you need to comply with regulations around the world. It can take months and a lot of money to write detailed documents about your asset.

This isn’t like writing a school essay. You need to validate the model, stress test and make sure that everything is sound. “The idea is to automate this process. Today, this process takes 6 to 9 months,” co-founder and CEO Panos Skliamis told me before Disrupt.

Spin Analytics calls its platform RiskRobot. First, you need to get a clean data set. The startup helps you aggregate, merge and cleanse data before processing it. This process alone usually takes 4 to 6 weeks.

Second, RiskRobot makes sure you comply with regulations in Europe, the U.S. and all around the world — Basel III, CECL, you name it.

Finally, Spin Analytics writes the big report. Regulators want to make sure that it’s accurate. That’s why the report contains step-by-step instructions so you can reproduce the model later. Overall, you can expect to leverage Spin Analytics to write a report in less than two weeks.

Spin Analytics has been working on this product for three years and is now testing it with some big banks, such as BBVA and Crédit Agricole. If everything goes well, those banks could end up using Spin Analytics for more and more asset classes.

It’s an easy sell, as banks could end up saving a ton of money. Credit risk management currently costs $500,000 to $1 million per model. “We reduce that by 70 percent,” Skliamis said.

Now, banks need to assess the risk of using this credit risk modeling system. It sounds a bit convoluted, but it also sounds like a great business opportunity.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Spin Analytics automates credit risk modeling for banks

A person with physical disabilities can’t interact with the world the same way as the able, but there’s no reason we can’t use tech to close that gap. Loro is a device that mounts to a wheelchair and offers its occupant the ability to see and interact with the people and things around them in powerful ways.

Loro’s camera and app work together to let the user see farther, read or translate writing, identify people, gesture with a laser pointer and more. They demonstrated their tech onstage today during Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin.

Invented by a team of mostly students who gathered at Harvard’s Innovation Lab, Loro began as a simple camera for disabled people to more easily view their surroundings.

“We started this project for our friend Steve,” said Loro co-founder and creative director, Johae Song. A designer like her and others in their friend group, he was diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, or ALS, a degenerative neural disease that paralyzes the muscles of the afflicted. “So we decided to come up with ideas of how to help people with mobility challenges.”

“We started with just the idea of a camera attached to the wheelchair, to give people a panoramic view so they can navigate easily,” explained co-founder David Hojah. “We developed from that idea after talking with mentors and experts; we did a lot of iterations, and came up with the idea to be smarter, and now it’s this platform that can do all these things.”

It’s not simple to design responsibly for a population like ALS sufferers and others with motor problems. The problems they may have in everyday life aren’t necessarily what one would think, nor are the solutions always obvious. So the Loro team determined to consult many sources and expend a great deal of time in simple observation.

“Very basic observation — just sit and watch,” Hojah said. “From that you can get ideas of what people need without even asking them specific questions.”

Others would voice specific concerns without suggesting solutions, such as a flashlight the user can direct through the camera interface.

“People didn’t say, ‘I want a flashlight,’ they said ‘I can’t get around in the dark.’ So we brainstormed and came up with the flashlight,” he said. An obvious solution in some ways, but only through observation and understanding can it be implemented well.

The focus is always on communication and independence, Song said, and users are the ones who determine what gets included.

“We brainstorm together and then go out and user test. We realize some features work, others don’t. We try to just let them play with it and see what features people use the most.”

There are assistive devices for motor-impaired people out there already, Song and Hojah acknowledged, but they’re generally expensive, unwieldy and poorly designed. Hojah’s background is in medical device design, so he knows of what he speaks.

Consequently, Loro has been designed to be as accessible as possible, with a tablet interface that can be navigated using gaze tracking (via a Tobii camera setup) or other inputs like joysticks and sip-and-puff tubes.

The camera can be directed to, for example, look behind the wheelchair so the user can safely back up. Or it can zoom in on a menu that’s difficult to see from the user’s perspective and read the items off. The laser pointer allows a user with no ability to point or gesture to signal in ways we take for granted, such as choosing a pastry from a case. Text to speech is built right in, so users don’t have to use a separate app to speak out loud.

The camera also tracks faces and can recognize them from a personal (though for now, cloud-hosted) database for people who need help tracking those with whom they interact. The best of us can lose a name or fail to place a face — honestly, I wouldn’t mind having a Loro on my shoulder during some of our events.

Right now the team is focused on finalizing the hardware; the app and capabilities are mostly finalized but the enclosure and so on need to be made production-ready. The company itself is very early-stage — they just incorporated a few months ago and worked with $100,000 in pre-seed funding to create the prototype. Next up is doing a seed round to get ready to manufacture.

“The whole team, we’re really passionate about empowering these people to be really independent, not just waiting for help from others,” Hojah said. Their driving force, he made clear, is compassion.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Loro’s mounted wheelchair assistant puts high tech to work for people with disabilities

Augmented reality has been a buzzword for years, but for the most part, it has remained a novelty. WiARframe, which is competing in our Startup Battlefield competition today at Disrupt Berlin, believes that we are still very early on in the AR game and that part of what is holding the market back is that the tools need to become easier to use and that designers need to find better ways to find inspiration for their AR experiences.

WiARframe tackles these issues by providing budding AR designers with an easy-to-use web-based interface for building AR experiences and a community feature that allows them to share these experiences with anybody who downloads the company’s iOS and Android apps.

The actual scene editor, the company’s founder Jeremiah Alexander told me, is modeled after other 3D modeling tools. In it, you can lay out the scene, but then also make it interactive. Typically, developers would do this in a complex and multi-faceted tool like Unity, but Alexander argues that the barrier of entry there is still too high for many non-developers, while wiARframe removes a lot of that complexity by offering a specialized tool that’s only for building AR experiences.”Unity is not for designers,” he told me.

In addition to being able to import 3D models, the tool also allows designers to add menus to a scene that can be used for settings or other in-app experiences.

As Alexander stressed, though, the community aspect of the service may be just as important. The idea here is to allow other designers to take existing scenes and remix them. That’s not unlike what Microsoft is doing with Paint 3D and Remix 3D, though Alexander likened it more to GitHub.

GitHub is also the inspiration for what will likely become wiARframe’s business model in the long run. Like on GitHub, wiARframe users will be able to use the service for free, but their creations will be public. To make them private, users will have to pay. In the long run, the company may also offer an enterprise plan with additional features.

While wiARframe started out with Alexander as a solo founder, the company now has three full-time employees. The team went through the Comcast NBCUniversal Techstars program earlier this year, and Alexander has an extensive background in designing games and other digital products. Indeed, early on in his career, he built tools for developers at Atari.

Alexander compared the state of AR to the early days of the web, where you had to be pretty technical to get started. The idea behind wiARframe is to democratize the ability to create AR content. What remains to be seen is whether that consumer demand for AR will ever crystallize. If it does, tools like wiARframe will surely make it easier for anybody to jump in and build new experiences.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | WiARframe wants to make building AR experiences easy