OS City

Jesus cares about the future of cities and governance models. He’s obtained Excellence Honors for both of his academic degrees, Mechatronics Engineer and PhD in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics. He’s has been featured as:

❖14 Latin-americans changing the world by Entrepreneur.com

❖Young Global Leader 2020 by the World Economic Forum

❖TED Speaker “Seres de Luz”

❖Mexico’s 30 Promises 2018 by Expansion

❖World Economic Forum Davos 50 2018

❖Skoll World Forum Social Impact Delegate 2018

❖Singularity University Global Solutions Program 2017

❖World Economic Forum Council of Future Cities and Urbanization 2017

❖Fellow of Open Government at the Organization of American States 2017

❖World Economic Forum New Champion 2015

As a technology entrepreneur, he praises data-driven strategies and top technology such as cloud computing, artificial intelligence and blockchain to address global challenges. He’s fully committed to growing OS City, a company he co-founded to make cities more sustainable and governments more trustworthy-jesus.os.city

We're living in unprecedented times of pandemic and urbanization on unstoppable scale. Our public institutions are living under huge stress and distrust, operating with legacy tools and bureaucracy that are incompatible with today. In short, public institutions are confronting its worst crisis of institutional agility, leading us to environmental, social and economic collapse. 

What we propose is to facilitate access to newest skills and technologies so that public administrations can tap into the most powerful technology. We have created the first App Store for public institutions to gain continuous access to new and better apps (we call them modules) to leapfrog digitization and go straight into a new way of interoperability and citizen inclusion.

We've impacted the lives of hundreds of thousands latin-americans by securing public money and empowering citizens to become auditors, at the same time we've improved government's trust and efficiency; leveraging faster and safer modernization.

Governments’ bureaucratic processes and trust levels are driving us into environmental, social and economic collapse. They are suffering a crisis of institutional agility. Each week, an estimated 1.3 million people move into cities, driving urbanization on an unstoppable scale putting governments under growing pressure, evidencing the lack of technological knowledge to innovate and their legacy tools that are insufficient to cope with daily challenges. According to McKinsey, this results in $5T government global revenues that go missing each year, 9 out of 10 powerless public servants, <50% constituent satisfaction, and 50% of rainforests devastated since the industrial revolution. In short, governments’ bureaucratic processes and trust levels are driving us into environmental, social and economic collapse.

Connecting Latin-American public servants to the latest knowledge, skills, partners and technologies to accelerate governments' transformation into platforms of digital services.

We connect them through the first App Store for public institutions, we call it GovStore, a one-stop shop where governments can find technology modules to digitize their processes in an interoperable way. It's a platform that gets better every time you use it, aiming to avoid governments' fragmentation and leverage interoperation. According to McKinsey, this can help city authorities to recover about 20% of yearly revenue leakage, increase workers productivity to save up to $3.5T in global inefficiencies per year, and offer a unified and better experience to increase constituent satisfaction.

Govstore is an ecosystem for the continuous access to knowledge, tools and partners to facilitate innovation, promote safer modernization, distribute development costs and speed technology adoption. Shipped with a modular set of technology services working as building blocks, Govstore is a long-term solution to transform governments into platforms of digital services. Current modules include: City Listener to analyze massive amounts of data using AI, Blockchain Certificates to serve the most secure digital documents, Trust & Transparency to help track government’s performance, and Open Urbanism to foster transparent urbanization.

Just in 2019 we issued +10K blockchain certificates ranging from university diplomas and handcrafted products, to government commercial licenses and inspection permits in countries such as Chile, Costa Rica, Argentina and Mexico; reaching an estimated 650K people interacting with issued assets. 

This means that the lives of those people have been impacted from what their governments do for them. Governments' operational control has increased. Decision-making has improved to optimize resource allocation and gain trust on the usage of money. Government's revenues have been recaptured more efficiently. Government's permits have been audited digitally not only by city inspectors but by regular citizens with a mobile device. Public workers productivity and citizen satisfaction have raised. In general, their lives have been improved.

Governance is among the most difficult problems of our world. Latin America, still has governments that operate like 200 years ago. They are far from having empathetic processes that invite the citizens to share, collaborate and participate actively. This creates an immense lack of trust an immense inefficiency towards building prosperity. 

What we are doing is elevating public administrators capabilities to match with today's city and citizens needs. In times of pandemic, authorities have understood the importance of going digital, thinking of it no longer as a nice-to-have but as a must have. We're using this chance to reinvent them.

I was born in Monterrey, Mexico. I care about the future of cities and governance models. I’ve obtained Excellence Honors for my academic degrees, Mechatronics Engineer and PhD in Artificial Intelligence. As a technology entrepreneur, I praise data-driven strategies and top technology such as artificial intelligence and blockchain to address global challenges including making cities more sustainable and governments more trustworthy.

Coming from using artificial intelligence for behavior-based robots’ control during my PhD, I was deep into automation and emergent intelligence of robotic teams. So, it may not seem like a logical background. Nevertheless, from a personal and technology-empowerment perspective it makes full sense. I’m using my technical background and personal experiences living in Monterrey, to fuse both worlds and aim towards a human collective intelligence that leverages new governance models and new approaches for cities to grow. I’m not an urbanist, not even a political scientist or government worker, yet I’m a technologist that understands how technology can serve to improve public institutions’ efficiency and trust.

Most importantly, I've been fortunate to meet the co-founding team, where we fused a data company, a government technology company and a smart cities and open government consulting company to build OS City.

Particularly in corona times, society needs to trust authorities and authorities need to purchase and deliver transparently. Blockchain is a game-changer for this dynamic. For the first time in history, we have a technology that guarantees security, transparency and anti-tampering. OS City uses blockchain to help city authorities provide digital services.

During these corona times, governments that were reluctant to prioritize their digital transformation have completely changed their mind, understanding that what we offer is no longer a nice to have, but a must have. Forecasting for 2020, it looks like a 2.5x growth. We can say that if something is accelerating the transformation of the Latin-American public sector it’s definitely the corona times.

Also, co-founders are key for me to keep moving. They usually see me “bigger” than I see myself, and this inspires me to be the one they believe I am. Their families, just in the last months 3 out of the 4 co-founders got babies: Felicitas, German and Aranza. These babies were born under space confinement, unable to see the world as we’ve seen it. Their freedom has been truncated. I want them to live vast and freely in a healthy society and a healthier world.

I was just named a Young Global Leader 2020 by the World Economic Forum. I was trained at Singularity University to fuse emergent technologies to impact the lives of a billion people. And I've proven impact in Latin America.

I've had the chance of chatting with incredible humans like Bill Gates, Jack Ma, Peter Diamandis, Ray Kurzweil, David Roberts, Klaus Schwab... they made me an exponential thinker, they developed my massive transformative purpose, they showed me how to be a purpose-driven disruptor.

I am a fellow at the highly selective Global Solutions Program at Singularity University 2017 focused on applying exponential technologies in finding impact solutions for global challenges at NASA Ames Research Center, Silicon Valley. My tech developments have been featured internationally by media such as Forbes, The New York Times, LeTemps; and organizations such as Google, Govlab, Media Lab Prado, Omidyar Network, Avinas Foundation, UNICEF...

I've been called to share ideas and vision at Davos, the OECD headquarters and the UN's World Urban Forum...

I've been a govtech entrepreneur for more than 5 years, bootstrapping. Having a startup is already complex, but growing it during pandemic when your target customer is the government in Latin America... that says something.

With COVID-19 we decided to closes offices in Mexico and Argentina, that was a huge leap to keep team motivated and productive. Now is 4 months of a super tight team.

Also, we organized the first online event Foro Govtech LATAM, mobilizing 1200 people in the Iberoamerican region to collaborate on the future of government technology. See govtech.lat.

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We're fusing emergent technology such as blockchain and AI to reinvent governments. What is more, we're doing it in an App Store - like approach so that governments pay only distributed costs and technology is constantly added so they can continuously modernize themselves.

Speaking about blockchain these are the results currently achieved.

• Successfully created and integrated blockchain digital certificates into their city platform issuing 10,000 certs reaching a population of 650,000 in Argentina, Mexico, Costa Rica and Chile that interact with local institutions receiving the unprecedented, tamper-proof and most secure digital assets including:

  • Education: Certified the graduation of 380 students from two schools in Argentina

  • Government: Certified 8000 public records ranging from commercial licenses, permits, city inspectors, energy records and public lottery registries in Argentina, Chile, Costa Rica and Mexico.

  • Supply Chain: Certified 15 brands including wine derivatives in Argentina and indigenous handcrafted products in Mexico

  • Social Sector: Issued 770 certificates including the Latin American Cada Dia Cuenta Hackathon participation certificates and sustainability commitments with the Observatory for Sustainable Development in Spain.

In the next year, we expect to increase those numbers including Panama, Paraguay, Ecuador and The Bahamas. Yet working in the govtech industry during a pandemic is highly uncertain, we won't be confident about numbers today, at least we expect to double current numbers.

In five years, we expect to leverage our current contracts such as building the National Blockchain Roadmap for the Presidency of Argentina, to provide Blockchain Citizen IDs and reach full population of at least one on the countries we're serving today.

1 Year: product development reaching self-service deployment and blockchain ID; business development reaching closer formal collaboration with CAF (Latin-American Development Bank, which finances public institutions to modernize).
2 Year: market expansion through Latin-America, reaching more public institutions hand-in-hand with UNICEF Innovation, CAF and the OAS.
5 Year: product development reaching first platform modules completely developed by third-parties without intervention of OS City; business development getting us into the de facto company to create a future vision for your government.
20 Year: we have built the ecosystem transforming Latin Americas' public sector into a data-driven decision-maker, bringing efficiency, trust and sustainability to every government

We're a startup, our target customer is the public sector, and we're living under unprecedented circumstances of a pandemic. This makes our plans risky in terms of revenue and financials. We depend on government's clarity to bet on a better future and today that's very opaque for them. 

Also, Blockchain has still a long way to become properly adopted in legal terms by most of Latin America's countries.

And finally, reaching our customers usually meant traveling, which is prohibited today.

Financial is happening through the collaboration with multilateral organizations. The OAS connecting us to governments, CAF financing pilot projects, UNICEF investing on our newest developments.

Legal, we've been closely collaborating with the OECD, here you can see us showcasing in its HQs in Paris on October 2019. This opens the opportunity for a major change in regulations promoted by the OECD to its 35 member countries. 

And finally, our typical customer has changed habits. A has-to-be physical meeting at their offices, now has the face of zoom or google's meet. This has become our best plan to overcome the non-traveling moment. 

We work together with key technology partners including UNICEF Innovation, Ethereum Classic Labs, Ethereum Foundation, Singularity University and Google. We work together with key public sector partners including CAF, OAS, WEF, IDB and OECD. 

We license software.

Selling to governments represents high uncertainty, so financial sustainability is better represented by the following image. Yellow, we license modules per year. Red, we gain visibility by giving freemium to first movers. Blue Chill, looking for partners to keep innovating (this is you!). Dodger Blue, creating a community of knowledge and mutual support (e.g. http://govtech.lat,  we're organizing the first GovTech Summit in Latin America). Purple, we reuse our technologies for impact and business purposes in other sectors (e.g. tracing handcrafted products using blockchain the same way we trace subsidies and travelers).

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