govtech
(76)
Riff City Sells Attention. Its Clients Spend It on Change.
A small San Francisco agency found a useful seam between publicity and public policy. Its best campaigns do not stop when the story lands - they give people a measurable next move.
HOTB Software Runs the Paperwork That Outlives the Program
Housing aid ends. The audit trail keeps going. HOTB sells the software and operational help that let public agencies and healthcare teams manage both the work and the evidence.
The Healthtech Accelerator That Teaches Startups to Survive the Public Sector
DigitalWell Ventures built an accelerator around the awkward bit of health innovation: getting a promising product through procurement, regulation and the raised eyebrows of real buyers.
The Dashcam That Wants to Give a City Eyes
NAYAN’s cameras ride buses, police vehicles and commercial fleets, turning ordinary journeys into a live index of potholes, violations and risky driving. The clever part is not the lens - it is the workflow that turns street footage into evidence someone can act on.
BEYOND4’s startup bet begins before the startup
In Malaysia, BEYOND4 connects skills training, startup programmes and routes into new markets. Its Pahang experiment shows why building the people can come before building the company.
IEBT Innovation sells the work after the brainstorm
The Brazilian consultancy pairs innovation programs with software teams and its own platforms. Its cases show what happens between a promising idea and an organization ready to use it.
ASSEK backs the people behind Kenya’s startups
Kenya has incubators, accelerators and business coaches. ASSEK’s bet is that helping them work better together can reach further than another startup programme.
Leading Cities wants your next climate idea to survive City Hall
The Boston nonprofit pairs startup training with prepaid city pilots. Its real test comes after the pitch: getting a charger onto a curb, a map into local hands, and a useful experiment into everyday service.
Made Tech wants government to work. Start with the wrong queue.
The British consultancy builds the digital plumbing behind public services. Its most revealing lesson: before speeding up a process, check whether it sends people to the right place.
Polaris Software and the business of getting paperwork out of the way
From pavement permits to police armouries, Polaris sells software for the work behind public services. Its growth rests on a practical bet: joining up the paperwork can be worth more than another app.
Beam stopped passing the hat. Now it sells time back.
The company that crowdfunded routes out of homelessness now sells AI tools to frontline services. Its wager: less paperwork can buy more time for people.
Arcus Global Put the Town Hall in the Cloud - Then Met the Mess in the Filing Cabinet
The Cambridge software maker sells councils one cloud platform for planning, licensing, waste and citizen service. Its growth explains the appeal - and its hardest migrations explain the risk.
Granicus Owns the Boring Stuff at City Hall - Now It Wants to Be Government's AI Front Door
The software best known for council agendas and government email alerts now touches 30 billion digital experiences a year. Its next bet is that a governed AI agent can turn the municipal website maze into a useful front door.
CATALIS Bought 30 Gov-Tech Companies. The Hard Part Was Making Them Feel Like One.
CATALIS assembled a billion-dollar government software portfolio by buying the specialists already running courts, tax offices and city halls. Now it has to make those inherited tools easier to use, easier to connect and harder for public servants to dislike.
CivicPlus Wants to Be the Operating System for City Hall
It began with four cities that were tired of calling a webmaster. Twenty-eight years later, CivicPlus is stitching websites, permits, potholes, public records and AI into one sprawling bet: that city hall would rather buy a connected system than babysit a dozen vendors.
Cloudpermit Turned a Government Side Project Into the Software Behind 1,450 Town Halls
The first version looked like a wireframe and swapped integrations for hand work. Thirteen years later, Cloudpermit is selling local governments a practical escape from paper files, phone tag, and the lonely spreadsheet that somehow runs city hall.
Brandt Put the DMV Inside a Camping App - and Built a Business Around the Mess
The Tallahassee software company turned permits, park bookings, boat titles, call centers and even waterproof license cards into one government-ready operating system. The trick is less glamorous than a consumer app - and much harder to copy.
Euna Solutions Is Building the Financial Back Office Government Forgot to Modernize
The public sector does not lack software. It lacks software that understands a bid protest, a grant audit and a city budget meeting. Euna Solutions is betting one connected suite can turn those peculiarities into an advantage.
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.
OpenGov’s $1.8 Billion Bet: Make City Hall Software Less Painful
OpenGov started by making municipal budgets readable. Fourteen years, ten acquisitions and a $1.8 billion deal later, it is trying to become the operating system behind the permit, purchase order and pothole.
The Garbage Trucks That Went to War With Urban Blight
A University of Alabama economics experiment strapped cameras to trash trucks to map urban decay. Five years and $15 million later, City Detect is doing the work of 40 code officers with one vehicle - and cities are starting to fix blight before it spreads.
The App That Follows Caseworkers Into the Field
Diona doesn't build the giant case-management systems governments buy. It builds the app that finally gets a caseworker out of the office - and Arizona says that saved $18.7 million a year.
The Startup Trying to Kill the Military's Most Dangerous Weapon: PowerPoint
A West Point officer watched treatment units get built where the virus had already left. He sketched the fix on a napkin. Six years later it is worth $2.15 billion.
Merlin Group Built a Three-Engine Shortcut Into Government Cybersecurity
Most cyber investors write checks. Merlin Group pairs capital with a FedRAMP platform and a federal sales engine - an unusually literal attempt to turn promising security software into government-ready products.
The Startup Teaching Governments to Read the $20 Trillion They Can't See
Most financial crime hides in plain sight, scattered across the open web. IVIX built an AI platform that reads all of it at once - and hands governments a map.
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.
Archon Technologies
Archon Technologies is a San Francisco startup (Y Combinator W25) that helps software companies sell to the U.S. government by automating FedRAMP, the federal compliance regime cloud vendors must clear before agencies can buy them. Its free-to-integrate SDK ships security controls compliant out of the box and, with AI-assisted documentation, aims to cut the certification timeline from roughly 16 months to 6 and save vendors about $1M. Founded by former U.S. State Department technologists George Parks and Sam Jung.
chromie.dev
chromie.dev (YC S26) is an all-in-one business development, capture, and proposal platform that helps firms find, qualify, and win federal and state, local, and education (SLED) government contracts. Built on the founders' 'deterministic stack for web agents' - browser agents that pair LLM reasoning with the reliability of RPA - the platform continuously scrapes procurement portals, fit-scores opportunities, predicts recompetes before they hit the market, extracts buried requirements from RFPs and SOWs, and drafts compliant proposals, with every parsed field traced back to its source clause for audit and QA.
Fed10
Fed10 is a full-stack AI legislative consulting firm that monitors every bill introduced across all 50 U.S. state legislatures and Congress, classifies whether each bill is a threat or opportunity to a specific client, drafts amendment language, and maps out who to call and what to say. Founded in 2025 by three former teenage lobbyists who dropped out of Harvard, Williams, and Berkeley, it aims to do the work of a $500/hour policy consultant in seconds instead of days.
Stella
Stella is a Y Combinator-backed AI assistant that turns any website into a 24/7 customer expert. Installed with a single line of code, it learns from a site's own content to answer visitor questions, qualify leads, and route complex cases to humans. Founded by Ryan Endacott (YC S22), Stella serves small businesses, SaaS companies, and local governments - including the Town of Carmel, NY, where it answered more than 2,400 resident questions and saved staff over 200 hours.