Our story began in 2019, with the need to create bridges between those who design federal public policies and the target audience . More specifically in Brasilia, when our co-founders were part of the Progredir project, led by GNOVA, the first innovation laboratory in Brazil's federal government.

Back there, we changed the focus of the Progredir platform, of the Ministry of Citizenship, from training to supporting self-employed workers. We realized this opportunity after listening to and including platform users in the project and realizing that their real needs were different from the platform managers' perception of what those needs were. To the users' experience, we added academic researchers, putting together a puzzle of knowledge and experiences.

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By bringing people who experience public policy closer together, we had not only brought new points of view to public servants, but legitimacy for our solution. We built the team's capacity to address social problems through collaborative processes.

We also found the main characteristics of Catálise: a participatory design startup that reconnects people and governments in search of more humane public policies , to catalyze social impact through collaboration and technology and foster an open public management ecosystem.