TALLINN — Pärtel-Peeter Pere, a former Member of Parliament and Deputy Mayor of Tallinn, has stepped out of the political arena to join British urban intelligence startup StreetVision as a late co-founder.
He joins co-founders Ellis Barker and Dominic Taylor as Head of Strategy and Market Expansion, helping build a platform that uses purpose-trained AI models and agent orchestration to digitise and assess street-level infrastructure.
The transition stems from a frustration well-known to civil servants: the agonisingly slow pace of municipal data collection. During his tenure as Deputy Mayor, Pere oversaw the city's successful takeover of snow-clearing operations, a process derailed by fragmented data on pedestrian walkways and bike paths.
"The city ordered a digital street survey. It was expensive, but limited. Creating an overview took unreasonably long," Pere said. "Or when we created Tallinn’s strategic four-year street renovation plan, a tool like StreetVision would have been really useful."
When Barker and Taylor — whose backgrounds span finance, economics, and civil engineering — presented an engine capable of condensing six months of traditional street assessment into a single week, Pere saw the exact tool he had lacked in office.
He subsequently rejected the typical post-political path of acting as a passive advisor. "I like to build. I enjoy leading and executive roles," Pere noted on his decision to take an operational role. "I'm driven by pace and results, not long meetings and herding cats. Herding AI agents is another matter."
The 2025-founded StreetVision positions itself in a European market driven by climate and mobility mandates. With civil servants in 431 European metropolitan areas required to adopt a Sustainable Urban Mobility Plan by the end of 2027, the startup targets a massive workflow bottleneck. By measuring current streets and future CAD designs objectively against local safety standards, the company claims to reduce engineers’ baseline assessment time by 80 to 95 percent.
Despite the technological leap, Pere remains pragmatic about his former public-sector colleagues.
"The hardest truth is that while we all wish to improve cities, municipalities will remain necessary, although often slow decision-makers," he said.
To hedge against public sector unpredictability, StreetVision is targeting the private sector, specifically engineering giants and infrastructure consultancies operating within the €9.4 billion construction design software market. Pere said that while the company's growth is dominated by scalable tech capable of currently mapping 250 kilometres of streets a week, human civil engineers remain vital to review and validate the AI's findings.
Pere also pointed out a critical misalignment between tech founders and public procurement. Startups often operate under the blind spot that the public sector wants to buy technology. "It doesn't," Pere said.
"It wants to buy less risk and more time," Pere warned, noting that this disconnect often leads to trophy pilot projects that die once funding runs dry.
For the local startup ecosystem, Pere’s transition and his critique of public procurement serve as a practical lesson in navigating GovTech. Public procurement, Pere argues, often defaults to the lowest known price, yielding cheap solutions that fail to move the needle and ultimately cost taxpayers vital time.
"To motivate the public sector to go beyond pilot projects, offer a scalable product that saves time and reduces risk and cost," he said.
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