OS City, a govtech company founded by PhDs in Political Science and Artificial Intelligence, is leveraging the newest technologies to improve government efficiency and trust while also aiming to build a more sustainable future. With the support and recognition of UNICEF Innovation, Singularity University, the WEF, Google, and many others, they are helping to cultivate the next generation of smart cities in countries such as Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Brazil and Colombia.

How it began…

The team grew up in a city that gave them a sense of exponential growth, but in less than 10 years the city went from being one of the “Top 5 Smartest Cities To Live” according to Forbes, to enduring a terrorist attack, the worst air quality in Latin America and unprecedented inequality and citizens distrust for government.

“The same is happening all over the world, we are transitioning from the homo-sapiens to the “homo-urbanis”, urbanizing exponentially. And our decision-makers, our governments, are unable to: grab city-wide perspectives, move at the speed that citizens demand, and understand what is best in terms of societal, environmental and economic actions.” — Jesus Cepeda, CEO of OS City

Drive towards a Solution….

Unlike other isolated solutions, OS City’s product is a software framework using cloud computing, artificial intelligence and blockchain to transform governments into integrated platforms of digital services. OS City is shipped with a modular set of services that work as building blocks to fulfill the most pressing needs of governments while letting the market give continuous access to new and better modules. OS City is creating an ecosystem for government software reuse and innovation transfer, promoting safer modernization, lower development costs and faster technology deployment.

OS City began pioneering implementations of AI and Blockchain in the Latin American public sector. They were the first to certify government information in 5 different blockchains including ETC. This has given them numerous great opportunities such as discussing the Future of Cities in highly selective meetings in Dubai (2017), showcasing new possibilities for governance models at the WEF Annual Meeting in Davos (2018), and proposing how to upgrade regulations according to blockchain experiences, to the 35 OECD countries in Paris. If this pace keeps up, while leveraging close relationships with organizations such as UNICEF, IDB, and CAF then OS City could become not only a first mover but also the de facto technology provider to create the new models of governance in at least 35 countries over the next 5 to 10 years.

An immediate impact….

The team has been working with several government entities to improve services and efficiency:

Guadalupe, Mexico

Increased citizen participation by 24x, while shortening response time from 2 weeks average to immediately

Tlalnepantla, Mexico

Pioneering a way to better understand the impact of public budgeting, resulted in going from 84th to 1st in public service delivery rank

Bahia Blanca, Argentina

Leading the fight against corruption while becoming the 1st city in Latin America to make a Blockchain real implementation for securing arts and culture subsidies

Chile’s National Government

Regaining trust and reducing red tape and corruption by using Blockchain to generate tamper-proof records in public procurement, contracting and energy

Teresina, Brazil

Pioneering the creation of a more convenient mass transit by digitizing stakeholder data and using Blockchain for more trustworthy record keeping to improve decision-making and fees

San Nicolás, Mexico

Creating the most secure digital documents using blockchain to license liquor sales and issuing construction permits with unprecedented transparency and auditability

Partnering with ETC…

UNICEF invited OS City to its first Blockchain Cohort and soon ETC became “the first follower”, trusting and validating that their work using blockchain could be supported by international organizations looking for social impact, and by technical and global communities seeing the potential of blockchain. This combination of supporters makes OS City unique in their focus to help governments increase their trust, and also gives them the opportunity to come up with more sophisticated technological offerings to do more social good.

“ETC Labs has fantastic geographical and technical advantages for us to increase our technological offering, but also for our business to build traction in terms of capital formation.” — Jesus Cepeda, CEO of OS City

Moving Forward…

OS City is working on three main things to have a well-established company:

Technology: They will consolidate their two flagship platforms,reducing the need for their team to intervene in new implementations. Capital: As one of the experts in the industry, Carlos Santiso says “The time to invest in GovTech is now, for Governments and Investors”. Market: Help the govtech market and ecosystem reach its maturity and start talking about the solid government need and a huge business opportunities for private and public sectors start to communicate more often.

The first one is happening now. The second one is being built along with allies such as UNICEF, ETC, CAF, IDB, Omidyar Network, Public, among others and should be booming in the next 2 years. Going from today’s early market (innovators and early adopters) to the mainstream market (early majority and late majority) will demand OECD and political will align the interest of citizens and socio-environmental pressures. The team believes this will take no more than 3 years.

To learn more about OS City, visit their website at https://os.city/.

If you are interested in being apart of Cohort III please fill out an application here https://angel.co/etclabs/applications

Find out more information about ETC Labs Accelerate Cohort II at www.etclabs.org/accelerate

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