Don’t worry, we speak : English (Inglés), too!

Contxto – La Corporación Andina de Fomento (CAF) y Oxford Insights se aliaron y publicaron su primer Índice GovTech.

Al estudiar 28 indicadores, clasificaron a los 17 países miembros de la CAF de Iberoamérica por lo robusto de sus ecosistemas govtech. El informe se enfocó en tres variables principales:

• La industria startup
• Políticas gubernamentales
• Sistemas de adquisición. 

Los gobiernos de América Latina son famosos por ser torpes al resolver problemas, incluso a veces lo hacen usando medios ilícitos. Govtech puede echar una mano si las autoridades, la cultura en general de un país y el ecosistema de startups lo permiten. Eso es justo lo que este informe se propuso descubrir.

España y Portugal se llevaron el primer y segundo lugar respectivamente por tener los mejores sistemas govtech. Pero ¿cuáles son los mejores tres países latinoamericanos?

Sigue leyendo y entérate.

1. Chile

Para el informe un factor importante fue la facilidad con la que un emprendedor puede iniciar un negocio en Chile.

También menciona las aptitudes digitales de los chilenos como otro factor positivo, además de que cuenta con la infraestructura tecnológica para continuar desarrollando soluciones innovadoras para el sector público.

Este pais latinaomericano también merece mérito por ChileCompra, un sistema de adquisiciones eléctronico que agrega transparencia y rendición de cuentas a las transacciones entre funcionarios públicos y empresas. 

Aunque se recomienda que el gobierno chileno le dedique más recursos a la medición del impacto de sus polítcias de datos abiertos. El informe también insta a una estrategia nacional que aborde govtech.

Por último, si consideramos que Chile tiene los niveles de corrupción más bajos en América Latina, eso lo convierte en el país mejor preparado para estar a la vanguardia en govtech.

• Artículo relacionado: El gobierno brasileño firma medida para reducir la burocracia para las startups

2. Brasil

El país más grande de América Latina también es hogar del mayor número de govtechs en la región. Además, existen muchas compañías de capital de riesgo en Brasil. El único problema es que no existen fondos dirigidos específicamente a govtech.

Por otro lado, el gobierno ha demostrado estar abierto a digitalizar tantas operaciones como sean posibles.

Sin embargo, el mayor obstáculo para Brasil es su actual crisis de confianza entre el gobierno y sus ciudadanos. Múltiples escándalos de corrupción en años recientes han logrado deteriorar sus lazos y podría tomar tiempo reconstruirlos.

3. México

Según el estudio, México tiene una buena cantidad de govtechs y su ciudadanía tiene un enfoque práctico en lo que resolver problemas públicos respecta. El problema es que hay mucha sospecha y desconfianza dirigida al sector público.

Además, existe una falta de estrategias federales integrales que promuevan el govtech. En cambio, los gobiernos locales a menudo lanzan sus propias iniciativas a su antojo. Por último, los pocos contratos que el gobierno les otorga a las startups no es prometedor. 

Si quieres leer el reporte completo, lo puedes encontrar aquí.

Artículos relacionados: ¡Tecnología y startups de Chile! 

-ML

Traducido por Alejandra Rodríguez

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.

The ZoomInfo IPO slipped through our fingers in the last news cycle, so we’re going to catch up.

Founded in 2000, the company has had a somewhat complicated history. ZoomInfo raised a Series A in 2004, according to Crunchbase data, but that’s where its funding history stops. The firm, a SaaS operation that provides information on business people, later sold itself to private equity firm Great Hill Partners in 2017 for a reported $240 million. That wasn’t the end, however. ZoomInfo was later sold to DiscoverOrg for a sum reported to be more than $500 million. DiscoverOrg is a sales and marketing services company based in Washington state that has raised money from private equity.

As you can imagine given the transactions ZoomInfo has gone through, the company’s accounting is a mess to understand. It’s latest S-1/A has the following wording to describe what the IPO encompasses, just to give you a taste:

Immediately following this offering, ZoomInfo Technologies Inc. will be a holding company, and its sole material asset will be a controlling equity interest in ZoomInfo HoldCo, which will be a holding company whose sole material asset will be a controlling equity interest in ZoomInfo OpCo. ZoomInfo Technologies Inc. will operate and control all of the business and affairs of ZoomInfo OpCo through ZoomInfo HoldCo and, through ZoomInfo OpCo and its subsidiaries, conduct our business. Following this offering, ZoomInfo OpCo will be the predecessor of ZoomInfo Technologies Inc. for financial reporting purposes…..

You don’t need to understand all that. Instead, this morning, let’s take a few minutes to dig into the company’s recent earnings results, and its valuation. How is the market valuing this firm? And did its previous owners do well to pay as much as they did for the company?

IPO fundamentals

Searchable.ai is an early-stage startup in the alpha phase of testing its initial product, but it has an idea compelling enough to attract investment, even during a pandemic. Today the company announced an additional $4 million in seed capital to continue building its AI-driven search solution.

Susquehanna International Group and Omicron Media co-led the round with participation by Defy Partners, NextView Ventures and a group of unnamed angel investors. Today’s investment comes on top of the $2 million in seed money the startup announced in October.

Company co-founder and CEO Brian Shin said that when he presented to his investors in early March at the last event he attended before everything shut down, they approached him about additional money, and given the economic uncertainty he decided to take it.

“Honestly we probably would not have taken additional money if it was not for the uncertainty around the macro environment right now,” he told TechCrunch.

The company is trying to solve enterprise search and being pre-revenue, Shin recognized that having additional capital would give them more room to build the product and get it to market.

“We are trying to solve this problem where people just can’t find information that they need in order to do their jobs. When you look within the workplace, this problem is just getting worse and worse with the proliferation of different formats and people storing their information in many different places, local networks, cloud repositories, email and Slack,” he explained.

They have a few thousand people in the alpha program right now testing a personal desktop version of the application that helps individual users find their content wherever it happens to be. The plan is to open that up to a wider group soon.

The road map calls for a teams version where groups of employees can search among their different individual repositories, a developer version to build the search technology into other operations and eventually an enterprise tool. They also want to add voice search starting with an Alexa skill with the general belief that we need to move beyond keyword searches to more natural language approaches.

“We believe that there’ll be a whole new category of search, search companies and search products that are more conversational. […] Being able to interact with your information more naturally, more and more conversationally, that’s where we think the markets is going,” he said.

The company now has more money in the bank to help achieve that vision.