Scytl, a Barcelona-based online voting company, announced today that it received a $40 million investment from Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital that will allow it to improve its technology for running elections over the Internet.
The company, which was founded in 2001, claims that it holds 87 percent of the online voting market, and has successfully conducted elections in 35 countries. Its customers have included the U.S. Air Force Institute of Technology and the French Security Agency. It has completed a number of high-profile acquisitions in the e-voting space over the past two years, including SOE Software in the U.S. and Europe-based PressVote. Scytl is currently pushing its end-to-end e-Election Platform, which “covers every process within an election, from election planning and voter registration to online voting and election night reporting.”
With the new cash, Scytl plans to build out new and undisclosed technologies, as well as continue its string of acquisitions in the voting space.
While online voting hasn’t caught on in a big way yet, Scytl argues that it’s well-suited to provide those solutions, because of a massive international patent portfolio that includes a number of security patents tailored to e-voting.
“Scytl is playing a pivotal role in helping governments worldwide to further embrace technology-driven modernization in their election processes, an area which will continue to undergo massive transformation in the coming years”, said Vulcan Capital’s Abhishek Agrawal, who is joining the company’s board.
Vulcan joins investors such as Balderton Capital, Nauta Capital and Spinnaker in the round. Vulcan expanded its operations to Silicon Valley last year, and also recently invested $30 million in car-buying advisor TrueCar.
