John Thomson wanted a sticker. His vehicle registration was due for renewal, a postcard had arrived, and the instructions pointed him to a website. He entered his details. The system could not find him. So, in 2013, a software executive climbed into the car he was trying to keep legally registered and drove to the DMV. The internet had managed to send him across town.
It is a wonderfully modest beginning for a technology company. No mysterious invention, no sudden change in the laws of physics. A person wanted to pay a government fee and get on with his day. Standing in line, Thomson began considering why such a small transaction required so much cooperation from the customer.
PayIt grew from that irritation. Thomson remains its founder and CEO, working from Kansas City on the proposition that public services should be easier to use. The interesting part of his story is what he brought to the queue: years inside software businesses, an early fascination with how companies work, and a publicly expressed attachment to the place where he was building.
The child watching the business news
Long before the registration postcard, Thomson had an unusual television habit. His parents were educators. Video games were forbidden at home, and he watched Nightly Business Report with his father instead. As a young boy, he listened while his dad explained business subjects that were hardly standard playground conversation. Some children learned the rules of imaginary kingdoms. Thomson was getting an introduction to actual companies.
He graduated from Baker University in 1995 with a Bachelor of Science in business. His next stops were Cerner and EMC, where his experience crossed coding, project work, business analysis, account strategy and sales. Before PayIt, he led Saepio Technologies, a software company serving distributed marketing organizations. By 2012 he was its president and CEO, assembling an executive team around a marketing automation platform.
That background matters because the DMV episode did not introduce him to software. It gave an experienced software operator a problem worth pursuing. He had worked on both the building and selling sides of technology. Now he was encountering a service whose customer journey ended with the customer leaving the computer and finding a parking space.
A queue becomes a company
PayIt dates its beginning to 2013. By January 2016, the business had more than 20 employees and announced a $4.5 million investment. Early reporting identified three co-founders: Thomson, Mike Plunkett and Ryan Townsend. The Kansas Turnpike Authority was already a client, with an app that let K-TAG users manage their accounts from their phones.
The starting point had been registration renewal, but the practical ambition was wider. Permits, taxes, licenses and citations all created variations on the same difficulty: residents needed to complete a task, while government organized the work through separate agencies and systems. Thomson’s proposed business would sit inside that daily traffic of obligations.
There is a useful humility in this choice of subject. Renewing a tag rarely makes anyone’s list of treasured experiences. Success means the task occupies less of a person’s attention. A payment goes through, a receipt appears, and the resident returns to something more interesting. For the people collecting revenue and answering questions, the same transaction also needs to work behind the counter.
- 01The postcardRegistration is due.
- 02The websiteThe record cannot be found.
- 03The queueThe errand moves offline.
- 04The questionCould this be simpler?
The money arrived. Kansas City stayed.
In March 2019, PayIt secured an investment of more than $100 million from Insight Partners. It was the sort of announcement that invites questions about where a growing company will go next. One reporter asked Thomson whether PayIt would move away. His response was brisk: “No. Why would I do that?”
For him, the investment also belonged to the surrounding business community. He described his own start at Cerner and looked at younger PayIt employees as possible future entrepreneurs. The company could become a place where someone else learned enough to start something. His interest extended beyond the current payroll to the businesses that might eventually grow from it.
Staying had already been a choice during earlier fundraising. In 2016, he described offers to relocate and explained that contributing to the local technology community mattered to the founders. PayIt later expanded beyond the United States, opening a Canadian headquarters in Toronto in 2020. Thomson said the expansion would leave Kansas City operations in place. Geography could widen without requiring a farewell speech.
A founder with other institutions to mind
Thomson’s public life reaches into organizations with much longer memories than a software release cycle. He has served on Baker University’s board of trustees and joined the National WWI Museum and Memorial’s board in 2020. The museum lists him as vice-chair for 2025-2026. His explanation for joining was personal: his father had served in the military, and he valued the museum’s work of remembrance.
Even there, his attention turned to access. He wanted digital devices to help more people encounter the museum’s history and stories. The subject was different from a tax payment, but the practical question was familiar: how could an institution reach people beyond the ones already able to walk through its doors?
His civic record also includes 16 years as an assistant director of the American Legion Boys State of Missouri. He received an Outstanding Eagle Scout recognition in 2018 and entered Junior Achievement of Greater Kansas City’s Business Hall of Fame in 2021. These are concrete commitments and honors, spread across education, youth leadership and local business. They give the Kansas City loyalty a life outside fundraising announcements.
“Perfect is the enemy of progress.”
John Thomson · Kansas City, November 2022
The award has a team attached
In 2020, Thomson received an EY Entrepreneur Of The Year Heartland award and StateScoop recognition for industry leadership. The individual honors came with a consistently collective explanation. When he was named an EY finalist, he began his response: “Individual honors are the result of the entire team”. He went on to credit colleagues, clients and the people they served.
The distinction becomes tangible in the products. In the same year, myNCDMV, developed with North Carolina’s transportation department, received a StateScoop innovation award. It let residents handle transactions including registration and driver-license renewals online. The founder’s original inconvenience had become work shared by public employees, software teams and residents in another state.
That is an awkward shape for a conventional founder legend, which prefers one central character and a clean moment of triumph. Government software involves people who must run the service after the announcement. Thomson’s public comments repeatedly make room for them. The practical outcome is something a resident can finish, and something an agency can keep operating.
From car stickers to fishing licenses
A $90 million growth investment from Macquarie Capital Principal Finance followed in August 2022. In 2023, PayIt moved into a broader set of outdoor recreation services through its acquisition of Sovereign Sportsman Solutions, known as S3. The deal was announced in May; by July, the company confirmed it was complete.
S3 brought software for hunting and fishing licenses, boats, recreational vehicles, specialty permits, and volunteer and event management. These were additional ways people met government while trying to do something else. Someone applying for an outdoor license is principally interested in the outdoors. Ideally, the administrative part does not become the day’s main adventure.
The acquisition also brought people with experience in conservation agencies and their customers. Thomson discussed the combination in terms of compatible missions, clients and teams. It expanded PayIt’s work while staying close to the original idea: help someone complete a public transaction without making that person untangle the institution behind it.
2013PayIt begins after the registration-renewal frustration.
2019Insight Partners invests more than $100 million.
2023The S3 acquisition adds conservation technology.
The next queue is inside the software
By 2026, PayIt described its reach as agencies collectively serving more than 150 million North American residents. That figure describes the communities its clients serve; it is not a count of people who have personally used PayIt. The distinction becomes especially relevant to Thomson’s current concern: getting residents to complete the online transactions already available to them.
Two PayIt studies published in 2026 examined that problem from different sides. A survey of 609 government leaders reported an average digital transaction rate of 49.5 percent. A separate survey of 1,038 U.S. residents found that more than a third had abandoned a digital government transaction midway. Poor usability was the leading reason among those who abandoned. The old journey from website to counter could still happen, even after a service went online.
Average digital transaction rate reported by government leaders in PayIt’s 2026 research.
In June, the company introduced Smart Works, an AI feature suite aimed at tasks including payment reconciliation, document review and staff questions about financial data. Thomson’s leadership team was addressing the work surrounding a payment as well as the payment itself. In September, PayIt received its second consecutive AWS Champion recognition from the Center for Digital Government and Center for Digital Education.
Thomson has been discussing focus and measurable results in his own 2026 posts. The questions he raises concern useful technologies, the skills government teams need, and how agencies prepare for the coming decade. They suit a founder whose opening problem was so specific. A person trying to renew a registration has a fairly direct definition of progress: can I finish?
Permission to begin without every answer
At a Kansas City entrepreneurship gathering in November 2022, Thomson joined founders Toby Rush and India Wells-Carter to discuss starting businesses. He argued against waiting until certainty arrived. His advice acknowledged that founders are fallible and have to move before they possess every answer.
Read beside the registration story, that sounds less like a slogan than a description of the sequence. First comes the irritating, ordinary encounter. Then a question. Then the work of finding people, building software, persuading agencies and improving what happens next. More than a decade after that postcard, Thomson is still working through the consequences of wanting to pay a fee and go home.