Colab, a technology startup that brings governments and citizens closer to more collaborative and efficient public management, raised more than R$ 3 million in a new investment. The contribution was made by two American and one Brazilian funds: Media Development Investment Fund (MDIF), which invests in independent media channels, Luminate, the philanthropic governance and citizen engagement arm of the Omidyar group, and EDP Ventures, the EDP Group's venture capital vehicle.

The new investment will make it possible to increase the scope of the business, with a growth in the user base and more services and tools for both sides: citizens and governments. To meet the expansion, the startup will also increase its team, which will have about 35 employees.

“Colab is going through a moment of great changes.For seven years we have been bringing innovation to governments, with the difference of also offering a channel to give more voice to the population ”, says Gustavo Maia, founder and CEO of Colab. “Having highlighted us as a govtech and brought to our side four important funds from the world that invest in this segment gives us confidence to continue generating a positive impact on our society”.

The funds that invested in Colab in this new round highlight that the business is well structured for a new stage of expansion.

"We are excited to increase our investment in Colab," says Harlan Mandel, CEO of MDIF. “We have worked with the company since 2014 and we know that it has solid foundations and is well positioned for growth.This investment round will allow Colab to expand its user base and develop new tools and services to better support citizen engagement and government transparency”.

“We live in a time when the population and their governments aim to strengthen relations.Citizens seek to guarantee the full exercise of inclusive citizenship, and public service providers are increasingly compelled to seek efficiency,” says Felipe Estefan, investment director at Luminate. "We are proud to invest in Colab, with the certainty that it is a company well positioned to make this connection".

“EDP Ventures has been an important channel for strengthening ties with the startup ecosystem.  Our fifth investment, takes place in this complex phase during the pandemic, showing our commitment to the ecosystem and our ability to look at the long term, which always keeps us active in the search for startups with strategic relevance for our Group. We are confident that Colab, with this contribution, will be able to further expand its operations in the utilities market”, says Rosario Cannata, Investment Manager at EDP Ventures Brasil.

This is the third investment received by govtech, which in 2014 had an investment of R$ 500 thousand from the KPTL manager (at the time, A5), which is an investor partner of Colab, and in 2015/16 received US$ 1.25 million from MDIF and the Omydiar Network.

“KPTL anticipated trends, investing in Colab in 2013. At the time, Brazil already demanded a very high level of digitalization to better serve citizens, whether in healthcare, mobility or security. In the pandemic, it was clear to everyone the deficiency that the State has because it is not very technological, with very few exceptions. Colab is a company made up of good entrepreneurs who identified a demand from citizens back for more voice, open their requests, give an opinion on their services and suggest improvements to the State ", says Renato Ramalho, CEO of KPTL.

Innovation for citizens and governments

Colab offers a technological solution for both governments and society. It was founded in 2013 with the mission of helping public management to become more efficient and responsive to the demands of society. In the same year, it was voted the best urban app in the world by the New Cities Foundation. Today Colab is used by more than 100 municipalities in Brazil and has more than 300 thousand users.

For citizens, Colab is a free application that works as a social network for citizenship, in which users post demands for urban janitorial services, inspect public services and respond to public consultations conducted by city halls, so that their opinion is taken into account in decision-making.

On the other hand, for governments, Colab delivers the demands of the population in real time, without bureaucratic obstacles, and offers management and analysis tools so that public managers are able to respond to requests in a structured way and can base themselves on proposals to lead to public administration. With Colab, city governments were able to increase their rate of resolving the demands of the population, with more agility and economy of resources, in addition to having greater popular participation in public decisions, ranging from the choice of urban equipment to participatory budgeting.

Colab is also the platform chosen by UN-Habitat, the United Nations Program for Human Settlements, to conduct an annual national survey on the perception of Brazilians about the living conditions in their cities.

EDP acceleration program and pilot project

Colab was one of the finalists in the EDP acceleration program in 2019, managing to present its solutions at the Web Summit, one of the largest entrepreneurship and innovation events in the world, held in Portugal. Even without winning the contest, the Pernambuco startup closed a partnership with EDP for a pilot project in Guarulhos, put into practice in February this year. It was the first time the startup worked with a service concessionaire.

In the initiative, citizens helped to monitor notifications registered by EDP's call center, such as trees touching electrical wires or sporadically fallen wires in the streets. Colab users received notifications with instructions on how to make a safe and proper survey went to the site to take some pictures with their own cell phone and sent the necessary information. After EDP validated the inspection, users earned a financial reward.

“Colab plays a fundamental role in bringing citizens and organizations closer together in order to improve the quality of the services provided. This purpose is in line with EDP's strategy, which is committed to the future of the electric sector, which is increasingly digitalized and decentralized”, says Livia Brando, director of Innovation & Ventures at EDP Brasil. “The results obtained in the project developed in conjunction with Colab were excellent and strengthened our decision making by investing in the startup. We have expectations of expanding the solution to other regions, being able to add new services to the scope and generating social impact and additional income for the citizens of the regions where we operate”.

Created in May 2018, EDP Ventures Brasil is the first investment conduit of the Brazilian electric sector, with R$ 30 million in resources to be used for startups operating in six verticals: renewable energy, smart grids, energy storage, digital innovation (blockchain, IoT, big data, virtual reality), customer-focused solutions and crosscutting areas (legal techs, fintechs, and hrtechs).

Brazil Without Coronavirus Movement

In March this year, with the arrival of the new coronavirus pandemic in Brazil, the startup started offering new features for citizen collaboration. Together with Epitrack, a data intelligence startup for disease monitoring and control, Colab launched a tool to map the risk of coronavirus cases throughout the Brazilian territory that have not yet been notified by official health surveillance systems.

Through the Colab application, volunteers send information about their health status daily, and the reported data are analyzed by an algorithm that classifies symptomatic and asymptomatic cases on a free map available on the Brasil Sem Corona platform.

The tool helps the population to know how the reality of the disease in their surroundings can be, as well as offering complementary information for public managers to predict trends in the pandemic's progress throughout Brazil. The data have already been used, for example, for public health to prioritize areas for the application of tests for covid-19 in the population.

The application also integrated the intelligent virtual assistant Cloudia, a healthcare chatbot, to answer questions from users regarding covid-19. In addition, it also allows users to report in their cities the practice of abusive prices of basic products, an irregularly opened event or trade, queues and crowds of people in hospitals and health centers and lack of food, medicines and basic products.

More information for journalists:

Marina Franco

marina@oficinadeimpacto.com.br | (11) 98266-1706