Helping a Start Up – Evoting

The last Sunday took place the municipalities elections in Chile, where the people that could vote and they didn’t reach almost a 70%. Also, the past year Chile was identified as the country on the OECD with more abstention in their democratic elections, this due to that the 58% of the citizens that could vote didn’t went to the polls. So is necessary to take actions and try to find new ways to motivate specially to the young people (18-30 years old).

One Start Up that is working in this is Evoting, a company in Chile that is trying to give a fresh air to the bureaucratic world of the democracy. Evoting offers the possibility to make electronic voting through internet. They manage the hole process, so the organization don’t have to take care of anything but make the question and establish who can vote.

They have a lot of possible costumers: schools, universities, municipalities, labor unions, big companies, or a whole country. Every institution that wants to make a democratic decision is allowed to take the service of this Start Up, at the moment they have 54 clients, but I’m sure that this number is going to continuously grow up.

I talked with Mario Novoa, Commercial Manager of Evoting, and he told me that the main difficulty that they had at the moment is the law restrictions, because the most of the processes need a Minister of Faith, so at the beginning they needed around 10 months to have the authorization.

I asked him also if they had change the service that they gave at the beginning, if they pivot the original service, and he told me that that service didn’t change it from the original one, but that they changed the segment of costumers that they expected to have, because in the beginning they thought the service for “political elections”, with citizen consulting driven by political authorities and municipalities. However, the demand of that segment has been really slow, so they had to change the costumers to institutions, unions and professional associations, where they found a bigger demand for their service.

In resources, and how they finance the investments, Mario told me that they raise cash from three ways: they made an investment with a family office and they won public funds for ventures.

With respect to the goals that they have to the future in medium term, he told me that they work to be the leaders in South America in electronic voting, and that they are starting the internationalizing process, this with the support of the operations that they have in Chile, which have been growing since the company started.

I told him that I think that maybe they should study the possibility to install some machines that can print a voucher, so the people that have more difficult to trust in this type of service, they could have something that check that they vote. He told me that actually they are studying possibilities like that, so they can improve their service.

You can learn more about Evoting in http://evoting.cl/

Kind regards!!