THE VIDEXT CASE

The three winners are new companies that offer solutions that can be applied both in government and at private companies. Vidext, for example, allows for the creation of training videos to be automated with the help of Artificial Intelligence and used by the Government of Biscay to help its teams adopt new technological tools.

This start-up is one of the many that have emerged from LEINN, the university degree in Entrepreneurial Leadership created by Mondragon University, taught at its Bilbao, Irún, and Oñati campuses. The company’s two promoters, Jon Enríquez (from Durango) and Beñat Arrizabalaga, realized that one of Artificial Intelligence’s main applications was going to be the automated creation of videos. To simplify: using a text and a gigantic audiovisual library, the software is able to choose the best pieces to accompany a voiceover fed into it. This is something that ChatGPT and other tools brought to the fore just three months ago.

Since they didn’t have enough technical knowledge, they turned to Miguel Castillo, an Artificial Intelligence specialist with whom they were able to develop an initial prototype. It worked, and they began to offer it to companies like Fagor and Cikautxo, which, due to their international nature, need to produce videos to train their staff in many languages. They saw that there was demand, so they decided to take the business a step further. After going through two start-up accelerators (Lanzadera and Open Future), they are now invoicing on a recurring basis with regular clients, and in June 2022 they closed an initial investment round generating €260,000.

The Government of Biscay will not be this start-up’s first institutional client, as Vidext was already working with the Government of Navarre, but this project does mark the consolidation of a business line with enormous potential. Until very recently, making a video required a high investment, and this greatly restricted demand. Thanks to Vidext, now creating videos is as easy as making a cup of coffee, which will significantly expand its use as a training tool.

THE TECHFRIENDLY CASE

In line with this example, there are many start-ups that may have never thought of the public sector as a client, at first, but then changed their tune. Others came about with working with the government in mind, like Techfriendly, a company from Barakaldo created by Sergio Serna and Gonzalo Pellejero to offer services related to smart cities; in other words, collecting data on the streets to improve the workings, mobility, and sustainability of cities.

Their project grew little by little, alongside the more than 100 town halls that contracted them, and today they are one of the national leaders in this field. Their proprietary solution is an SaaS, Cloud-based one, and it has become one of the standards used by local governments that want to innovate with the help of data and Artificial Intelligence. Next Generation funds are helping them to multiply their activity.

THE NYMZ CASE

Another case of a Biscayan start-up that works mainly for the government is Nymiz, a spin-off of Serikat, Erhardt’s IT consultancy, part of a family group from Bilbao with activities in sectors as diverse as Logistics and Insurance. Their product is capable of taking a document and deleting all references to individuals in it so that its free and open publication complies with data protection laws. That is, it anonymizes documents. The Spanish justice system was one of its first clients, using the solution to remove personal data from court rulings.

THE DECIDEDATA CASE

In Biscay there are other start-ups looking to GovTech with interest. These include all those working in Big Data (Data Analytics), from Decidata, in Getxo (created by Gonzalo Artiach and Iñaki Pertusa), to Anjana Data (created in Madrid by Mario de Francisco and Fernando Agudo and recently established in Bilbao). Both have developed complementary platforms to bring order to an organization’s data – what is known as “data governance” – and to analyze it. The Government Biscay is, in fact, one of Decidata’s clients.

Things are going to be more difficult for start-ups that have developed online voting tools, generally supported by Blockchain to provide maximum reliability when votes are being tallied. Although parliamentary bodies seem like they would be their natural clients, the truth is that current law does not facilitate the use of their solutions. Hence, Appsamblea (created in Biscay by Guillermo López Alonso and Jesús Ángel Bravo) has focused more on sports entities, companies, and even unions.