civic-tech
(14)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.