civic-tech
(35)
Tiffany Pang-Cadengo and the problem between the agencies
She left an engineering job at Instacart to help cities respond to homelessness. Outreach Grid began with a deceptively practical question: how could the people helping the same person share what they knew?
Sunil Rajaraman and the business of paying attention
He turned screenwriters into a writing marketplace and helped bring The Bold Italic back to life. After losing a city council race, Sunil Rajaraman found his next business in the meetings most people skip.
Oath: A brake pedal for political giving
Political fundraising rewards the candidate who gets your attention. Oath asks a less theatrical question: where would your next dollar actually help?
Countable and the Civic App That Became a Company Town Square
Countable taught people to speak to Congress. Then it discovered that companies, causes and campaigns wanted a way to listen - and to turn that conversation into action.
The Government Form That Refused to Die
GovOS made a business out of the chores citizens notice only when they go wrong - permits, records, taxes, signatures and payments. Its rise, and one costly migration that did not work, explain both the promise and the limits of digital government.
PayIt Put a Checkout Button on City Hall - Then Learned Ease Is Not Adoption
PayIt built a modern front door for taxes, tags and tickets without asking government to bulldoze the systems behind it. Grand Rapids shows the playbook can work; Toronto shows exactly where it can crack.
Dhruv Maheshwari Is Turning the Stop Sign Into a Feedback Loop
Before Obvio put AI cameras beside Maryland intersections, Maheshwari spent a decade testing one idea: technology matters most when it changes what people do in the real world.
David Geilhufe Has Spent 30 Years Making Nonprofit Technology Less of a Chore
From an improvised missing-person database after Hurricane Katrina to AI built for grantmakers, the Resilia CEO keeps returning to one practical question: what can technology take off a nonprofit’s plate?
Accela
Accela powers the permits, inspections and licenses most people notice only when they stall. Now the 27-year-old govtech company is stitching city hall into one cloud platform - and betting that practical AI can make the machinery move faster.
Eyal Feder-Levy
Eyal Feder-Levy is the co-founder and CEO of Zencity, a govtech company that uses AI to turn millions of resident interactions into actionable insight for local governments. An urban planner by training who came up through nonprofit community work in South Tel Aviv, he started Zencity in 2015 to give cities a routine 'finger on the pulse' of their communities. Under his leadership the company has raised roughly $93M, works across six countries, and serves hundreds of government agencies reaching hundreds of millions of residents.
Hsin Hsiao
Hsin Hsiao (蕭新晟), also known as 蕭A, is the co-founder and CEO of OenTech (應援科技), a Taipei-based fintech building a one-stop integrated payment cloud platform that combines third-party payment processing with supporter-relationship management. A physicist turned software engineer, he trained at UCLA and Stony Brook before working across New York startups, co-launched the crowdsourced 'National Treasure' archival project through Taiwan's g0v civic-tech community, and ran for Taipei City Council in 2018. Since founding OenTech, he has grown it to more than 3,000 organizations, secured a NT$100 million Series A in 2025, and pushed payment security and agentic-commerce standards in Taiwan.
CivicActions
CivicActions is a fully remote digital services firm that helps U.S. federal, state, and local government agencies modernize the technology behind public services. Founded in 2004 by Henry Poole and Aaron Pava, the company pairs free and open-source software - especially Drupal - with agile delivery, DevSecOps, human-centered design, and accessibility expertise to rebuild legacy government websites and platforms. Guided by the values of Balance, Openness, and Care, CivicActions has served agencies including Veterans Affairs, the FCC, the National Science Foundation, and the State of Georgia while contributing heavily back to the open-source communities its work depends on.
Rec Technologies
Rec Technologies builds the software that runs local Parks & Recreation - a modern operating system that lets residents discover, book, and pay for courts, classes, clinics, and community programs, while giving recreation departments the tools to schedule staff, manage facilities, and grow revenue. Founded in 2022 by former Uber and The Athletic operators Birju Kadakia and Rachel Williams, Rec is used by 100+ cities and communities and raised an $11M Series A in 2025 led by Crosslink Capital with backing from athletes including Kevin Durant, Larry Fitzgerald, Joe Montana, and Kelvin Beachum.
Outreach Grid
Outreach Grid is an Irvine, California software company building a unified platform that helps cities, counties, service agencies, outreach workers, and law enforcement collaborate to understand and end homelessness. Founded in 2016 by Tiffany Pang-Cadengo and John Cadengo under parent company Appledore, its coordinated-entry system spans street outreach, case management, shelter and bed matching, housing navigation, and Point-in-Time counts - turning fragmented field notes into shared, actionable data used by more than 23 municipalities across the United States.
Pavilion
Pavilion (formerly CoProcure) is a San Francisco-based govtech company building the marketplace for public procurement. It lets state, local, and education agencies find and reuse contracts that other public entities have already competitively bid and awarded - a practice called cooperative purchasing or 'piggybacking' - so buyers skip months of paperwork and vendors sell more using contracts they already won. The platform is free for governments, and layers vendor search, smart intake routing, compliance guidance, and an AI Contract Hub on top of a repository of tens of thousands of shareable public contracts.
Recidiviz
Recidiviz is a nonprofit technology company that stitches together the fragmented data trapped inside America's prison, parole and probation systems and turns it into usable tools. Its platform - and its newer AI-powered Case Planning Assistant - helps corrections agencies in roughly 19 states surface people eligible for early release, automate case triage, and connect returning citizens to housing, treatment and jobs. Founded in 2019 as a volunteer project at Google, Recidiviz's mission is to accelerate progress toward a smaller, fairer, safer justice system.
Tolemi
Tolemi is a Boston-based govtech company whose flagship platform, BuildingBlocks, stitches together scattered municipal data - property records, ownership, code violations, tax liens - into a single map-based interface. State and local governments use it to run spatial analysis, spot problem properties, and make faster, data-driven decisions about housing, land use, and neighborhood revitalization. Formerly OpportunitySpace, the company rebranded to Tolemi after Y Combinator and today serves cities from New York to small towns across the U.S.
Jutta Friedrichs
Jutta Friedrichs is a German-born designer and co-founder of Soofa, the Cambridge, MA company that makes solar-powered digital signs for city sidewalks. Before Soofa she ran the MÜ furniture studio in Shanghai, co-founded Xindao's in-house design team, won two Red Dot Awards, an iF Design Award and an Elle Decoration Award, and earned a Masters at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. She mentors at the Harvard Innovation Lab and works at the seam of hardware, human-centered design, and the civic public realm.
Andrew Kieve
Andrew Kieve is the co-founder and CEO of Tolemi, a Boston civic-technology company whose BuildingBlocks platform stitches together the messy, siloed property data that cities sit on and turns it into maps and insights officials can actually act on. Originally launched as OpportunitySpace in 2013 and rebranded after a 2017 run through Y Combinator, Tolemi now helps state and local governments fight blight, enforce housing codes, and protect affordable housing across dozens of American cities. A Stanford and IESE graduate and former Innosight consultant, Kieve has spent more than a decade convincing governments that the answer to neighborhood decline is hiding in their own databases.
Chris Foreman
Chris Foreman is the co-founder and CEO of Marketplace.city, a Chicago-based govtech platform that helps local governments find, validate, and buy new technology with the help of real pricing, contract, and outcome data. Before building Marketplace.city, he scaled AvePoint's Americas business from a small team to more than 1,200 employees across 15 countries and launched its public-sector subsidiary, where the company won three straight Microsoft Partner of the Year awards. A Northwestern political science graduate, he has spent 15-plus years in enterprise software and now spends his days trying to drag government buying out of the PDF era.
Mariel Reed
Mariel Reed is the co-founder and CEO of Pavilion (formerly CoProcure), a San Francisco software company building a search engine for the $2 trillion world of state and local government purchasing. A Georgetown valedictorian who taught in Xinjiang and helped Coursera expand across Asia before working inside San Francisco's Mayor's Office, she became obsessed with one unglamorous lever for changing lives at scale: procurement. Pavilion lets public servants find and reuse contracts other agencies have already competitively bid, cutting months of duplicated paperwork. She launched it during the COVID-19 pandemic and grew it from a two-person team into a venture-backed company.
Tiffany Pang
Tiffany Pang is the co-founder and CEO of Outreach Grid (Appledore, Inc.), a software platform that helps cities, outreach workers, law enforcement, and nonprofits coordinate the work of reducing homelessness. A San Francisco native and Yale-trained neuroscientist turned software engineer, she left a Silicon Valley job to build tools that connect the people working on the streets with the agencies that can house and help. Her work earned a spot on Forbes' 30 Under 30 for Social Entrepreneurs, and Outreach Grid has expanded to communities across multiple U.S. states.
Oddball
Oddball is a McLean, Virginia-based digital services agency that modernizes how the U.S. government talks to its citizens. It builds and maintains some of the federal government's busiest websites - notably VA.gov for the Department of Veterans Affairs and Medicare.gov for CMS - using human-centered design, agile engineering, and modern cloud infrastructure. Founded in 2016 and led by CEO Travis Sorensen and CTO Rob Wilkinson, the remote-first firm calls itself 'a strangely human digital agency,' and grew to roughly 340-366 employees and ~$117M in annual prime contract revenue before taking a 2025 growth investment from private equity firm Falfurrias Management Partners.
Alex Niemczewski
Alex Niemczewski is the co-founder and CEO of BallotReady, the nonpartisan online voter guide that covers every race and referendum on the ballot across all 50 states. She built the first version for herself before the 2014 midterms because she didn't know how to vote for the down-ballot offices nobody talks about - water reclamation commissioner, judges, mosquito abatement boards. A University of Chicago philosophy graduate who taught coding and ran a research-design consultancy, she turned a personal frustration into a civic engagement platform that informs millions of voters and powers tools for campaigns and advocacy groups.
BallotReady
BallotReady is a Chicago-based civic technology company behind the nonpartisan online voter guide at ballotready.org - the place you go before you vote. It gives Americans tailored, trustworthy information on every candidate and referendum on their ballot, all the way down to school boards and water reclamation districts, plus tools to register, find a polling place, and make a plan to vote. Through its CivicEngine platform and API, BallotReady also powers voter registration, candidate recruitment, and turnout campaigns for organizations, brands, and nonprofits. Founded in 2015 out of the University of Chicago, it has helped tens of millions of voters and was acquired by Civitech in May 2025.
Fletcher Wilson
Fletcher Wilson is the co-founder and CEO of Throne Labs, the company behind the largest network of connected public restrooms in the United States. A mechanical engineer trained at Penn and Stanford, he spent nearly a decade building InterVene, a medical-device startup, before turning his attention in 2020 to a problem hiding in plain sight: the disappearance of clean, accessible public bathrooms. Throne's solar-powered, sensor-equipped units deploy in under two hours, are free to use, and have logged more than a million uses across 20-plus cities. In October 2025 the company raised an initial $15 million Series B led by Brentwood Associates.
Maggie McCullough
Maggie McCullough is the CEO and founder of PolicyMap, the Philadelphia-based mapping and data-visualization platform she launched in 2008. A former White House budget-office staffer turned housing researcher, she built PolicyMap after struggling to fit maps and data into her own policy work, betting that anyone should be able to make a map as easily as they shop online. The platform now serves universities, banks, health systems, nonprofits and governments, layering thousands of public and proprietary datasets into one searchable map. In December 2023 the company closed a $3 million Series A led by its former parent, the Reinvestment Fund.
MD Ally | 911 Network Navigation
MD Ally is a New York-based health-tech company that plugs telehealth directly into the 911 system. Founded in 2018 by Shanel Fields, the daughter of a volunteer EMT, the platform adds a 'virtual response tier' so dispatchers can route non-emergency callers to the right care instead of automatically sending an ambulance and an ER trip. By partnering with public-safety agencies and insurance payors, MD Ally cuts unnecessary emergency costs while connecting patients to telehealth, mental health and social services.
Henry Poole
Henry Poole is the co-founder and CEO of CivicActions, a professional services firm that has spent over two decades modernizing government digital services through open source software, agile methodologies, and human-centered design. A serial entrepreneur and open source visionary, Poole co-founded one of the first digital agencies (Vivid Studios) in 1993, published the landmark Affero General Public License (AGPLv1) in 2002 to close the 'ASP loophole' in open source licensing, and serves on the board of the Free Software Foundation. Under his leadership, CivicActions has become a trusted partner to major federal agencies including CMS, NSF, VA, and HHS, championing the principle that software built with public funds should be publicly owned.
Jesse Hassinger
Jesse Hassinger is the CEO of Hustle, a San Francisco-based peer-to-peer text messaging platform used by nonprofits, political campaigns, labor unions, and universities to mobilize people at scale. With over eight years at Hustle progressing from Director of Support to Director of Product before taking the helm as CEO in early 2025, Hassinger brings a rare blend of grassroots political organizing experience and deep product intuition to leading one of the most widely adopted civic tech platforms in the country — one that has facilitated over one billion text conversations.