Colin MacNaughtThe insider who left government to rebuild the bond market

Every road, school, bridge, and hospital built with public money in America runs on a quiet, enormous market that most people never think about: municipal bonds. Colin MacNaught spent seven years at the center of it, and what he saw there became the reason he left.

From 2008 to 2015, MacNaught ran debt management for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. In that stretch he issued close to $25 billion in bonds and notes, financing the ordinary machinery of a state - the construction, the refinancing, the day-to-day borrowing that keeps public services funded. It was work that got noticed. Industry groups like the National Federation of Municipal Analysts and SIFMA singled out his deals for their innovation, and The Bond Buyer, the trade paper of record for the muni world, named his transactions national Deal of the Year twice.

By any conventional measure, he had arrived. He had a title, a track record, and a stable seat in public service. He also had a growing sense that the tools around him were badly out of date. The market he worked in - one of the largest in the United States - still moved on PDFs, phone calls, and relationships. Issuers struggled to reach investors. Disclosure was scattered and slow. The information gap between a small-town treasurer and a large institutional buyer was wide, and that gap cost money.

In 2015 he left the Treasurer's office to do something about it. He co-founded BondLink, a company built on a simple but pointed thesis: if you give public-sector issuers modern technology to be transparent with investors, the whole market gets more efficient - and lower borrowing costs flow back to taxpayers. It was not a pitch he had to imagine. He had lived the problem from the inside.

MacNaught knew exactly what was broken. What he did not have was a background in building software - and he was clear-eyed enough not to fake it. So he paired up. His co-founder, Carl Query, came from the opposite world: a serial technologist who had co-founded FlipKey, later acquired by TripAdvisor, and been a founding engineer at Compete. One founder carried deep domain knowledge of how bonds actually get sold; the other carried the engineering firepower to turn that knowledge into a product.

That division of labor shaped the company. BondLink became a debt-management and investor-relations platform aimed squarely at the people MacNaught used to be - public-sector treasurers and finance officers. Instead of forcing issuers to juggle disclosure, compliance, investor outreach, and bond-sale prep across disconnected tools, the platform pulled the work into one place, and paired the software with dedicated human support.

Investors took notice too. In 2018, BondLink raised a $10 million Series A led by Franklin Templeton, and Robert Stevenson of Franklin's equity group joined the board. In 2021, the company raised an $18 million Series B, with Intercontinental Exchange - the parent of the New York Stock Exchange - coming in as a strategic investor. For a market often described as sleepy, that was a notable signal: some of the biggest names in finance were betting that the muni world was ready to move online, and that a former state treasurer was the right person to lead it there.

The scale followed. BondLink's platform grew to serve issuers in 45 states. Since 2018, clients have issued more than $115 billion in bonds through it, and the investor-relations sites it powers have drawn over two million visits. Those are large numbers for a company most people outside public finance have never heard of - which is, in a way, the point. MacNaught was never trying to build a consumer brand. He was trying to fix the plumbing of how governments borrow.

What makes MacNaught's argument different from the usual startup story is that it rests on plain financial logic rather than novelty. In the bond market, investors price risk partly on how much they can see. When an issuer shares clear, timely, well-organized information, buyers can evaluate a bond with more confidence - and confident buyers accept lower yields. Lower yields mean cheaper borrowing. Cheaper borrowing means a town pays less to finance its new school.

Framed that way, transparency stops being a compliance chore and becomes a competitive advantage. That is the case MacNaught makes to the treasurers and CFOs on the other side of the table, and it is one he can back with his own résumé. He spent years being the customer he now sells to, which gives his pitch a credibility that is hard to manufacture.

His public identity reflects how completely he has committed to this world. His Twitter handle is not his name - it is @munibondlink. The man and the mission have more or less merged. Studying public finance at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government gave him the theory; seven years at the Massachusetts treasury gave him the reps; and BondLink has become the place where both come together.