FiscalNote and the price of knowing what happens next

Three hours to understand one bill. In FiscalNote’s account of childcare network Upwards, that was sometimes Katie Dunlap’s price for assembling a bill’s status, sponsors and contact information. The information was public. The afternoon required to gather it was hers. Washington has made a fine art of publishing things that remain surprisingly difficult to know.

Dunlap monitors childcare legislation across all 50 states, sometimes following as many as 100 bills in a session. Her earlier system mixed state websites, reminders, CRM notes and occasional lobbyist updates. In the company’s August 2025 case study, she estimates PolicyNote saves 80% of her research and tracking time. Treat that as one customer’s estimate, rather than a laboratory result. It is still a revealing description of the problem.

The bottleneck was assembling an answer soon enough to do something with it. A morning alert, a summary and a staffer’s contact details let Dunlap begin a conversation while legislation was developing. FiscalNote’s business rests on that interval between discovering a proposal and arriving too late to influence it.

A motel, then a newsroom

In June 2013, Tim Hwang, Gerald Yao and Jonathan Chen flew from Maryland to Silicon Valley. They worked out of a Motel 6, building a company around legislative and regulatory information that existed in scattered, awkward forms. They returned east with investment capital. The origin has the familiar startup furniture: laptops, limited funds, an inexpensive room. The customer problem was unusually old-fashioned. Government was producing paperwork faster than busy people could make sense of it.

FiscalNote’s early proposition applied software and predictive analytics to that disorder. Collect the documents, structure the data, follow the lawmakers and estimate which bills might advance. A forecast gives a policy team a way to ration its attention. It does not grant the team a view of the future; it makes the queue of things demanding attention more manageable.

Then came an expensive acknowledgment of what a document cannot tell you. In August 2018, FiscalNote completed its $180 million acquisition of CQ Roll Call from The Economist Group. The purchase joined the young company’s technology to congressional journalism, analysis and established information products. A bill’s text can tell you what it proposes. Understanding the committee, the compromise and the political appetite requires another kind of work.

“We quickly learned that technology alone isn’t enough.”FiscalNote’s account of its own evolution

That sentence on the company’s About page is a useful key to the business. FiscalNote employs a combination of data science, reporting and policy expertise. Its distinction is the way those activities meet inside a customer’s workflow. The glamour belongs to AI. Some of the value still comes from a person who understands what happened in a committee room.

From notice to a conversation

PolicyNote, launched in January 2025, is the current flagship. FiscalNote announced completion of the migration from its legacy platform in January 2026. The new platform brings together monitoring, AI search, bill summaries, forecasts, stakeholder information, reporting and CQ analysis. For a government affairs professional, the promise is a shorter journey from an alert to an informed response.

Consider a hypothetical association watching a proposal that affects its members. It can find and track the bill, compare versions, review an AI summary and investigate the sponsors. The team can then prepare a briefing and record its engagement. FiscalNote also offers PolicyNote+ services, including analyst curation, weekly briefs and custom research. Buying more software capacity and buying more expert attention are separate, but complementary, choices.

VoterVoice handles the grassroots side: helping organizations mobilize supporters and direct their messages to the appropriate lawmakers. It reports more than 2,000 organizational customers. A 2025 integration brought VoterVoice campaign and constituent data into PolicyNote stakeholder records. Before a legislative meeting, a team can see direct engagement alongside grassroots activity in that lawmaker’s district. The meeting starts with a better memory.

The product family also reaches beyond Congress. Curate follows local government activity across more than 12,000 municipalities and 4,000 school districts. EU Issue Tracker supplies analysis of European Union developments. The local agenda is particularly instructive: something that looks provincial can matter greatly to a business operating across hundreds of places.

FiscalNote serves corporations, associations, nonprofits and government agencies. It says its customers include more than half of the Fortune 100. Those buyers have different causes, but a shared practical problem: policy changes can alter the conditions under which they operate. In this market, Quorum offers overlapping tracking, relationship and advocacy tools, while Bloomberg Government combines reporting with government affairs intelligence. AI itself is no longer an unusual feature. FiscalNote’s pitch depends on its data, owned reporting, analyst services and connected advocacy tools.

The cost of collecting companies

A company can solve a customer’s information problem while developing a complexity problem of its own. FiscalNote raised $160 million in combined growth capital and debt financing in December 2020, led by Arrowroot Capital and Runway Growth Capital. Its portfolio expanded into adjacent areas of market, geopolitical and security intelligence. It became publicly listed in August 2022. For a time, the corporate story was about gathering more capabilities under one roof.

The direction subsequently changed. In March 2025, FiscalNote completed the sale of Oxford Analytica and Dragonfly to Dow Jones for $40 million. It said roughly $27.1 million in net proceeds after customary adjustments would reduce senior term debt, leaving a balance of approximately $61.5 million. The stated logic was tighter policy focus, simpler operations and a stronger balance sheet. Selling assets made that logic concrete.

The financial pressure was substantial. FiscalNote’s annual reporting records $95.4 million in 2025 revenue and a $65.2 million net loss. In March 2026, it announced an organizational transformation involving an approximately 25% workforce reduction, linked to wider AI deployment. Its careers page speaks of flexibility, ownership and putting people first. The restructuring is another material fact about working there, and belongs beside those employer-stated values.

That March, the NYSE initiated delisting proceedings after FiscalNote’s average share price failed the exchange’s $1 requirement. Shares subsequently began trading on OTCID. In June, director and investor Key Compton became president and CEO, succeeding Josh Resnik. Founder Tim Hwang remained executive chairman. The public-market celebration in the photograph is part of the history, rather than a description of the company’s present listing.

In August 2026, FiscalNote sold FrontierView to Oxford Economics. Following the sale, it revised full-year revenue guidance to $74 million-$76 million, while saying its expectations for the core policy business were unchanged. A smaller reported business partly reflects assets leaving the accounts. Retention adds another piece: second-quarter results showed quarterly net revenue retention improving to 98%, but trailing-twelve-month retention of 81%. The recent quarter looked better; the longer period still recorded substantial erosion.

A subscription to attention

The commercial model is mostly recurring subscriptions. In the second quarter of 2026, subscription revenue accounted for $18.8 million of $19.6 million total revenue. The published PolicyNote platform plans start with software access, then add analyst curation and weekly briefs at higher tiers. Customers request a quote. The purchase decision therefore turns on coverage, support and the value of the work displaced.

FiscalNote is also offering its intelligence through APIs and an MCP connector, which lets AI assistants access policy data. It announced expanded API and MCP support in March 2026, followed by availability in Anthropic’s Claude Connectors Directory in August. That changes where the product can be used: policy intelligence can enter an organization’s own systems or an assistant it already uses, rather than requiring every question to begin in a separate dashboard.

The approach is most useful when a team faces many jurisdictions, recurring monitoring and decisions that need a shared record. For a person following one occasional bill, a government website and a reminder may be enough. A forecast cannot ensure passage. A summary still needs checking when precise wording matters. Mobilization software cannot manufacture a constituency or persuade a lawmaker by itself. Those are practical boundaries of the workflow.

Readers can copy the underlying method without copying the purchase: define the issues and jurisdictions, turn updates into a shortlist, attach each important development to an owner, and decide the next action. Keep the original document close to the summary. Record the conversation alongside the bill. The useful unit is an informed next step.

FiscalNote’s narrower strategy applies a version of that discipline to its own portfolio. The founders began with scattered policy information. The company now has to prove that concentrating on that information can support a healthier business. Its customer proposition remains wonderfully concrete: fewer afternoons spent finding out, more time left to do something.