Stae wants to help local governments collect, manage and process data about their infrastructure. The company just raised $1.5 million from Story Ventures, Fontinalis Partners and Samsung Ventures.
I first covered Stae back in April 2016. The vision hasn’t changed much, it’s all about preparing cities for the future and upgrading infrastructure by making it more efficient through technology. But there are now a couple of cities using Stae for their digital strategy, making it a bit more real.
So far, Atlanta and Jersey City started implementing Stae with their existing services. You can think about it as a sort of GitHub meet IFTTT for infrastructure data.
“Cities are still thinking about data as archive files. They’re not thinking about streams of data,” Stae co-founder John Edgar told me.
So let’s take this step by step. First, cities already have many sets of data coming from utilities, public transport, ambulances, residence complaints, traffic cameras and more. Instead of exporting a CSV or Excel file every now and then to look at this data, Stae wants to turn this data into APIs. By doing that, Stae standardizes data sets and it becomes easier to manipulate them.
And Stae is not the only one thinking this way….