A voice for the voiceless, our investment thesis in Citibeats
As investors, we are fully aware that our minds are skewed towards certainty and that we have a biased mind. Yet, there is no doubt about the fact that differentiating good from bad investments is all about good or bad information, enriched data and real time access to them. Whether it is financial data (growth, margins) or impact data (gender wage gap, carbon footprint), we need information to take action.
Now, imagine that you are at the top of the most complex social organizations such as governments or multilateral organizations, and you need to take action with the existing data sources. These three main problems (real-time, bias and causality) become a much bigger obstacle in order to make the right choices.
1. Real-time information is the only valuable source of information
The current healthcare crisis has proven that government actions need to be swift in order to give a proportional response to some of the biggest challenges of our time. Some of the most critical aspects could have been potentially addressed earlier, diminishing the size of the problem.
Interests, fears, wishes and concerns are constantly shared through the Internet every second, however, many of those are consistently ignored. Society evolves extremely fast and despite the fact that we are the generation with the fastest access to information, feedback and response to social changes are late, costing lives and resources. Citibeats consolidates the interest of every individual in real-time, structuring and anonymizing the quantitative and qualitative data and allowing the decision makers to make the right choice at the right moment.
2. Causality, the chicken and egg dilemma
Information is easy to manipulate, and somehow similar figures could lead to different conclusions. For instance, the correlation of two different sets of data may not lead to causality depending on the context.
Citibeats technology involves a number of social parameters to put information in context and brings reliable data to the table. In addition, the software can detect social risks and leading indicators from unstructured data in order to avoid late response to social changes, saving lives and important resources. The secret sauce of the company is the AI technology and its ability to apply context to both data and data sources.
3. Bias: the silent enemy
The augmented text analytics platform of Citibeats connects to +100k data sources (public & private) in any language every day empowering a huge number of individuals and reducing bias, especially gender-based.
The proprietary AI Technology, a combination of NPL and ML, allows collecting data from different data sources, contextualizing them, understanding them and transforming them into insights for decision-makers to act upon faster. It is fully developed in-house, the platform is easily adaptable to any user and the AI is language agnostic in order to involve the maximum data points as possible.
Citibeats, ready for the biggest challenge
Over the last decade, the GovTech market has experienced rapid growth and acceleration driven by a perfect storm of market dynamics, including democratized technology infrastructure, reduced friction in the procurement process and increased access to government datasets.
The GovTech ecosystem will experience further growth and innovation in order to meet the needs of the residents it serves. We believe that citizens’ direct participation is one of the main govtech challenges, hence Citibeats is very well positioned to become a leading player in a huge market opportunity.
