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13.04.2023

Meet data entrepreneur Faruk Tuncer

The Hertie School alum talks about prepping public administration for the digital age.

Faruk Tuncer is always looking for ways to improve the world around him. “One question that keeps me busy is how we can transform the public sector,” Tuncer says. Many know the problem. When accessing civil services in Germany such as a new passport, a lot still has to be done in person. For authorities, meanwhile, it is not always easy to get various citizen data compiled in one place. Depending on the service or report, they have to contact several people, talk to different organisations, or merge several data sets into one. “In short, public administration is not as efficient and knowledgeable as it should be in the digital age,” the Hertie School Master of Public Policy alumnus explains. That’s why he founded his GovTech company Polyteia: to leverage digitalisation to improve the way public administration works. 

“After I graduated from the Hertie School in 2016 with a Master of Public Policy, I worked for the German Christian Democratic Party and advised them on urban policy,” Tuncer says. “While my degree helped me a lot to gain a fundamental understanding of public policies, I soon realised how urgently German administrations need to digitalise and transform their operations to cope with increasing levels of data complexity and shortage of skilled personnel,” he adds. And that’s where the idea of the GovTech company Polyteia was born. Polyteia is a data platform for the public sector. It merges hundreds of data sets from registers and specialised procedures so that policy advisors can create reports at the click of a mouse. 

Seven years after its founding, Polyteia has already digitalised more than 80 public administrations and is steering innovation in the public sector. This potential is also attractive to investors. In March, Tuncer and his team raised five million euros in additional funding from HV Capital, one of the top-tier venture capital firms in Europe. “We will use this capital to strengthen our GovTech category leadership in Germany, boosting our platform capabilities and opening our product to partners,” the start-up founder says. 

We look forward to watching how Polyteia improves Germany’s public administration in the years to come!

Come meet Faruk Tuncer on 3 May for a conversation about the opportunities and challenges for GovTechs in innovating the public sector and driving government digitalisation. 

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