Chris Foreman builds a search bar for the thing cities hate most: buying technologyFrom AvePoint to city hall - 1,200 employees, then a startup of 19Marketplace.city tells a clerk what peers paid, what they bought, what it didThree straight Microsoft Partner of the Year awardsSeed-stage and aiming at a trillion-dollar buying problemChris Foreman builds a search bar for the thing cities hate most: buying technologyFrom AvePoint to city hall - 1,200 employees, then a startup of 19Marketplace.city tells a clerk what peers paid, what they bought, what it didThree straight Microsoft Partner of the Year awardsSeed-stage and aiming at a trillion-dollar buying problem
Govtech / Profile / Chicago
Chris Foreman
He spent a career selling software to giant institutions. Then he decided the most broken buyer in America was city hall - and built the place where governments shop.
Co-Founder & CEO
Chris Foreman. The political science major who reads government contracts for fun - and turned that into a company.
1,200+
AvePoint employees grown
15
Countries reached
3x
Microsoft Partner of Year
2017
Marketplace.city founded
The work right now
A clerk signs a contract and is the only person in the room who doesn't know what anyone else paid.
That sentence is the whole company. Chris Foreman runs Marketplace.city, a Chicago platform that does something almost rude in its simplicity: it tells a government buyer what other governments bought, what happened when they used it, and what they actually paid. In an industry built on opacity, he is selling the receipts.
Marketplace.city connects local governments to the technology providers who can help them - and then arms the buyer with pricing data, contract data, vendor profiles, and real outcomes. The pitch is not "here is more software." The pitch is "here is the information you were never given." Foreman's team of roughly 19 people works out of 20 N Wacker Drive, downtown Chicago, taking aim at one of the slowest, least transparent markets in the economy.
He frames the moment as a shift, not a niche. Technology budgets, he points out, no longer live only inside the IT department. Public health, public works, public safety, contactless services - all of them are now buying software, and most of them have never bought software before. COVID-19 and a public demand for transparency only accelerated it. The buyers multiplied. The guidance did not. That gap is the market.
In the procurement industry, no one is telling the actual government end user what everyone else is using, what was the outcome of the use of that technology, and what they actually paid for it.Chris Foreman - on the information gap he built a company to close
How he got here
Fifteen years of selling enterprise software taught him exactly where the bodies were buried.
Before Marketplace.city, Foreman was the CEO of the Americas for AvePoint. He helped take it from a small team to more than 1,200 employees across 15 countries - the kind of scale that teaches you, painfully, how large organizations actually decide what to buy. Then he did the thing most enterprise leaders avoid: he leaned into government. He launched AvePoint Public Sector as an independent subsidiary and served as its CEO and Chairman. During his run, AvePoint won three consecutive Microsoft Partner of the Year awards.
Earlier, at Nutech Integrated Systems, he ran enterprise sales across healthcare, archiving, e-discovery, and records management - the unglamorous plumbing of how regulated institutions keep their data. It is a resume that reads like a slow education in friction: every stop, another lesson in how hard it is to sell good technology to a buyer who can't see the market.
His training, oddly, wasn't technical at all. Foreman studied political science and international affairs at Northwestern University, graduating with honors. He came to software through the side door of how power and institutions work - which may be exactly why he ended up obsessed with the institution everyone else ignores: the one that runs your city.
AvePoint
CEO of the Americas. Scaled it to 1,200+ people in 15 countries and learned how the enterprise really buys.
AvePoint Public Sector
Founded it, chaired it, ran it. His first deep dive into government as a customer worth serving.
Nutech Integrated Systems
Enterprise sales in healthcare, archiving, e-discovery, records - the regulated, high-friction trenches.
The timeline
From a New York City beta to a company of its own.
Early career
Enterprise sales at Nutech Integrated Systems - healthcare, archiving, e-discovery, records management.
The AvePoint years
CEO of the Americas; grows the business to 1,200+ employees in 15 countries and wins three straight Microsoft Partner of the Year awards.
2016
Launches the Marketplace.nyc beta with New York City's Mayor's Office of Technology and Innovation - proof before product.
2017
Spins Marketplace.city out as an independent company, headquartered in Chicago, Illinois.
2021
Raises an additional $1M to keep building the data-driven procurement platform.
What a government buyer can finally see
Marketplace.city - the data that used to be invisible
Pricing transparencywhat peers actually paid
Vendor references & profileswho's used it, and how
Outcome & contract datawhat the technology delivered
Time to a confident decisionfaster, with less guesswork
In his own words & off the record
The receipts.
On the shift
"Technology investments are made outside of traditional IT departments as contactless services, public health, public works and public safety join the digital economy - accelerated by COVID-19 and calls for greater transparency."
On the opportunity
"There are so many startups out there that have the technology to create safer, smarter and more inclusive communities."
On the gap
"No one is telling the actual government end user what everyone else is using, the outcome, and what they actually paid for it."
The person, not the title
A father of four who reads procurement records the way other people read box scores.
Foreman lives in Evanston, Illinois, with his wife Katie and their four children - a short train ride from the Wacker Drive office where his small team is trying to reorganize a trillion-dollar market. He is active in the IAMCP, Voices for Innovation, and the Small Business Advocacy Council, which tracks for a founder whose whole thesis is that small, smart vendors deserve a fair shot at public contracts.
There is a tidy irony in the origin story. Marketplace.city didn't begin as a pitch deck. It began as Marketplace.nyc, a beta built shoulder-to-shoulder with New York City's own innovation office. The company proved itself inside a government before it ever tried to sell to one. For a man who studied how institutions work, that's not a coincidence. It's a method.
Watch
The Intersection: a chat with Chris Foreman.
Foreman sits down to talk govtech, procurement, and where city technology buying goes next.
