When their globally acclaimed project to prevent suicide and promote wellbeing along the banks of the River Foyle failed to get off the ground, friends Jak Spencer and Ralf Alwani set out to address what had gone wrong.
The result of that soul-searching is a Belfast-based tech business that’s about to transform the public sector and has just closed a £1.3 million first funding round – one of the highest valuation seed rounds out of Northern Ireland in the last 12 months.
If that wasn’t enough, the entrepreneurs and housemates are building the type of business they would want to work in – bringing together people to use tech for social good.
And it all stemmed from the £25m Our Future Foyle project, in Derry/Londonderry, which never happened.
The pair met while working at the Royal College of Art in London, leading on a project for the Public Health Northern Ireland to use art installations to combat high suicide rates along the River Foyle. But, says Spencer, it failed because it was only ever seen as a health project, when it had the potential to make a wider impact.
That realisation – that projects have potential for bigger impact that needs to be measured – led to the founding of tech platform Polyloop.
The software tracks the impact of spending in real-time to enable organisations to further their real-world impact, better meet their targets and shape future funding decisions.
Put simply, a council allocated funding for a project might use Polyloop to log all money spent, input all activities the cash has made happen and measure the impact made against goals. The data can be accessed at any time, meaning impact can be assessed and changes made should targets not be being met. And that could mean better decisions in the future.
The team is already working with the NHS, a major EU body and a network of 32 EU cities among others – public bodies with a combined public spending budget of more than £1bn – but the potential is massive, they say.
Alwani, named on the Forbes 30 under 30 list for 2021 for social impact, says public sector organisations must become more accountable.
Each year the UK Government spends around £432bn on major public projects. However, the National Audit Office reports that only about eight per cent of that money is robustly evaluated.
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“There is real inconsistency in the way different government bodies evaluate respective projects, with much of the monitoring and measurement done through basic spreadsheets and PDF documents,” says chief executive Alwani, who, like Spencer, works between the Belfast and London offices.
“We know civil servants work hard, day and night, to do great work but there must be a better way to track and measure the impact of spending, which will then allow them to make pivotal decisions to refine projects. Polyloop does that.”
One mission for Polyloop will be changing mindsets, says Spencer, chief impact officer who has consulted on projects for the likes of IKEA, Google and the Gates Foundation, as well as co-authoring a book for Routledge on the impact of sustainable development goals. Public sector organisations can be resistant to change, weighed down by legacy systems and cash-strapped.
“There was a moment where I realised that what we were doing is different, but it seemed so obvious,” he says. “There is some inertia, because people feel they already have an effective spreadsheet system in place, for example, but once they see Polyloop they get what it’s all about and how it can transform what they’re doing.”
The pair are driven by the need to do social good in a time where budgets are stretched. Polyloop is being used by the NHS Automation Accelerator, which is supporting digital transition and robotic process automation at Northampton General Hospital, enabling the hospital to track the overall return on investment of emerging tech as well as the impact on patient and staff experience, safety and waiting list reduction.
The need for a tool like Polyloop, in a climate where public sector organisations need to regain trust of the public, is backed by a number of high-profile investors, including Wayne Story, former chief executive of Civica, and Creative UK, which made Polyloop the first Northern Irish business in its portfolio.
The funding will be used to add features, expand internationally and grow the team, which currently brings varied experiences. There’s an architect, a town planner, a visual artist and former civil servants in the team. Employees work a four-day week and there’s an employee partnership scheme. “None of that needed any discussion, we knew that was who we wanted to be,” Spencer says.
“People are our USP,” adds Alwani. “We used to go into meetings and be honest and say ‘we don’t know the best outcome yet but we know we have the talent to get there’. Now, thanks to our people, we do know where we’re going.”
Away from their technical experience, Spencer, who has a PhD, says Polyloop has the perfect blend of personalities, starting with himself and his co-founder.
“Ralf is very much an entrepreneur, a real go-getter, optimistic and makes relationships quickly, whereas I’m the thinker who likes to take a step back and take a softer approach, and that seems to work,” he says. “What drives us both is doing good. We’d love to be in a position to feel we’ve influenced the way people evaluate, monitor and evidence for good.”