Imran Khoja

He's automating the most ignored office in your county building

Every time a house sells, a deed gets filed. That deed lands on the desk of a county assessor's office, where workers manually key in owner names, parcel numbers, and sale prices - an act repeated millions of times a year across American counties. The technology underpinning most of these offices was designed in the 1990s and has barely changed since.

Imran Khoja co-founded Just Appraised in 2017 with Travis Noll specifically to break that logjam. The company builds AI-powered workflow software for assessors, county clerks, and 311 services - not another enterprise SaaS dashboard, but purpose-built automation that processes deeds in seconds, validates sales data, tracks exemptions, and handles constituent inquiries with an AI front desk. The kind of software that makes a county official look up from their screen and say, out loud: "This is profound."

One county's testimony said it all: "1.3 FTE cost equivalent outproduced 6 employees." That math is why Just Appraised has expanded from a single-state YC experiment to a multi-state platform with over 300 county clients. When government software actually works, it spreads by word of mouth between county assessors at state conferences - the most underrated distribution channel in B2B.

The designer who decided to fix government

Before Just Appraised, Imran was the kind of person who could have built the next consumer app - and was, for a while. He came up through Williams College studying Economics and Psychology, spent a year at Oxford, then moved through some of the most design-forward organizations in tech: IDEO, where he worked as a Business and Interaction Designer, and Spotify, where he was a Product Owner. He also put time in at Fiksu and spent a stretch as an Investment Partner at Dorm Room Fund, backing student founders before he fully became one himself.

The Stanford MBA in 2015 was where the arc bent. Stanford GSB is the kind of place that makes people want to solve big structural problems - not just ship features - and the grinding inefficiency of local government property administration was exactly that kind of problem. Imran and co-founder Travis Noll saw it clearly: a massive market, a captive customer base, and software so old that nearly any improvement would feel like magic.

They went straight from GSB into Y Combinator's Summer 2017 batch. The YC stamp matters in enterprise govtech perhaps more than any other sector - it signals that a tiny startup will still be around in five years when the county's multi-year contract reaches renewal. That credibility, combined with the genuine depth of the product, has been the compound that's driven expansion to 30 states.

He won the first business plan competition Williams College ever ran

In January 2012, in his final semester at Williams College, Imran and a classmate named Katy Gathright won the school's first-ever business plan competition. Their idea: Designed Good, an online marketplace for socially responsible products. The category would later become crowded, but in early 2012 it was a sharp read on where consumer behavior was heading.

That early bet on mission-driven commerce didn't become a unicorn, but it was the first signal of a specific kind of entrepreneurial instinct - finding markets that move slowly but predictably, and positioning ahead of them. County assessor software isn't as emotionally resonant as socially responsible goods, but the instinct is the same: identify where change is inevitable, build before the crowd arrives.

AI that reads deeds so county staff don't have to

The core problem Just Appraised solves sounds technical but is fundamentally a human one: county assessors are drowning in paper. A single busy county might process hundreds of deed transfers per day, each requiring staff to manually read, interpret, and enter data into legacy systems. Errors compound. Backlogs grow. Constituents wait weeks for simple status updates.

Just Appraised's platform uses OCR, natural language processing, and machine learning to extract structured data from deed documents automatically - parsing grantor/grantee names, parcel identifiers, legal descriptions, and transaction details without human intervention. That same AI backbone powers exemption validation, fraud scoring (drawing on over 10 billion data points), Prop 19 workflow automation for California counties, and an AI front desk that handles constituent inquiries in real time.

Ventura County Assessor's Office was among the notable recent implementations, using Just Appraised to automate manual processes around deed documents and title transfers. The company's approach - deeply vertical, purpose-built for government - means the software speaks the language of assessors natively, not as a translated afterthought from generic document management tools.

The tech stack reflects the sophistication of the problem: React, TypeScript, Python, PostgreSQL, AWS, Docker, Terraform, and Anthropic Claude - AI-native from the ground up, not retrofitted.

The running that explains the company

Running a startup is an endurance sport. The comparison gets made so often it's cliche - except when someone actually runs at an elite level. Imran's sub-2:45 marathon time puts him in roughly the top 2% of all marathon finishers globally. That's not recreational jogging. That's structured, disciplined training sustained over years alongside building a company.

He talked about it on the "Runners of The Bay" podcast - specifically about finding resilience through running, and the intersection of working hard, training hard, and running fast. The framing matters: this isn't someone who compartmentalizes the two. The disciplines bleed into each other. Long-distance running teaches exactly what govtech sales requires: patience with a long sales cycle, precision in execution, and the knowledge that compounding effort eventually produces results that look sudden from the outside.

The sequence that made sense only in hindsight

Three schools, one throughline

$24.8M raised. 300 counties served. The real metric is the one counties never share publicly

Just Appraised has raised $24.8 million in total funding, with investors including Durable Capital Partners, Highland Capital Partners, Pear VC, Catapult VC, and Future Communities Capital. The April 2024 Series A was the milestone round - a signal that the govtech thesis is working at scale.

The $3.8M ARR figure, achieved in mid-2024 with a team of approximately 40 people, reflects a company with strong unit economics operating in a market that rarely makes headlines. Local government technology spending doesn't generate breathless TechCrunch coverage. That's part of why it's a good business - low press attention means low competition.

The 300+ county footprint across 30 states is the number that matters most for the next chapter. Government software distributes through trust networks - when a county assessor in Virginia sees the same platform working in Texas and Florida, the sales cycle compresses dramatically. Each new county adds to the reference base that makes the next county easier.