govtech
(40)
Matt Singer Keeps Choosing the Hard Categories
From HR software to city hall to multilingual AI, the San Diego marketer has made a career of turning complicated software into a reason to care.
Anna Rolnicki Learned to Read a Room at Sea. Now She Helps GovTech Find Its Audience.
Before permits, planning applications and inspection reports, Anna Rolnicki worked the most literal kind of live audience: cruise passengers. Her route to Cloudpermit's C-suite is a study in attention, translation and the quiet craft of making complicated work matter.
Suzanne Behrens Spent 30 Years Making Government Technology Feel Human
She helped scale Microsoft's public-sector business from $100 million to more than $3 billion, then spent her final CMO chapter replacing mass marketing with precision. Her enduring idea is simpler than the software: sales and marketing should share the work, the numbers, and the consequences.
Kelly Davis-Felner Has Spent a Career Making Complicated Technology Feel Obvious
From Wi-Fi standards to tax bills and fishing licenses, the PayIt CMO keeps returning to the same deceptively hard assignment: turn complicated systems into experiences ordinary people can trust and use.
Jennifer Edwards Turned an Industrial Design Degree Into a Career Building Growth Engines
The Euna Solutions CMO began as an industrial designer. Two decades later, she still treats growth the same way: understand the system, make complexity visible, and build something people can actually use.
Felicia Curcuru Found the Future of Child Welfare in a 70-Column Spreadsheet
She began with families, rebuilt around social workers, and turned four months of patient observation into software used by more than 550 agencies. Her enduring product lesson is also her simplest: follow the sticky notes.
Kamran Saddique Is Making Government Paperwork Behave Like Software
His route from Sun Microsystems and Gulf finance to public-sector software explains an unusual bet: the least glamorous government workflows may be where technology can do its most practical work.
George Parks Found a Million-Dollar Tollbooth in Government Software. So He Started Taking It Apart.
A Georgia Tech coder went to the State Department, met the bureaucracy from the inside, and came back with Archon - a bet that the dullest obstacle in software may be one of the most valuable to remove.
Ananth Sankaralingam Took Doughnuts Door to Door - and Found Chromie’s Real Business
A failed browser-extension product, a one-way flight to Virginia and visits to roughly 50 contracting offices taught the young engineer a lesson no dashboard could: the useful signal is often hiding in the work people still do by hand.
Miten Marfatia Has Spent 25 Years Teaching Old Code New Tricks
Long before legacy software became an AI talking point, the EvolveWare founder was turning source code into something organizations could read, test and change - one cautious phase at a time.
Gavin Baum-Blake Is Teaching City Hall to Notice What It Misses
The Army veteran and attorney built City Detect around a stubborn municipal truth: cities cannot fix what they cannot see. His next test is making computer vision useful without letting the machine make the human decisions.
Ryan Litt Is Turning the Fireground’s Two-Radio Problem Into One Clear Picture
A fire chief once held a radio to each ear and listened for panic. Ryan Litt saw a product brief hiding in that impossible ritual - then built FLORIAN to make emergency scenes legible.
Zac Bookman’s Long Bet on the Boring Work of Government
He went from studying corruption in Mexico and advising a military task force in Kabul to spending fourteen years modernizing municipal budgets, permits, and procurement. OpenGov’s $1.8 billion deal was the visible result; the more revealing story is how Bookman learned to make persistence operational.
Arik Flanders Is Marketing the Machinery of Everyday Government
After 14 years marketing semiconductors, Arik Flanders moved into public-sector software. Now his job is to turn the hidden systems behind courts, taxes, schools and public safety into a story people can understand.
Colin MacNaught
Colin MacNaught is the CEO and co-founder of BondLink, a Boston-based fintech company that brings modern technology and transparency to the municipal bond market. Before starting BondLink in 2015 with technologist Carl Query, he spent seven years managing debt for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, issuing close to $25 billion in bonds and notes and earning two national Deal of the Year awards from The Bond Buyer. He studied public finance at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and built BondLink to give public-sector issuers digital tools to reach investors, improve disclosure, and lower borrowing costs for taxpayers.
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.
Irina Denisenko
Irina Denisenko is the co-founder and CEO of Knox Systems, an Austin-based cybersecurity company that delivers 'FedRAMP as a Service' to help commercial software vendors get authorized to sell to the U.S. government in roughly 90 days instead of years. She started Knox in 2023 after living through the FedRAMP bottleneck herself as COO of Class Technologies, where she scaled the company to $50M in ARR. A repeat operator who also helped build drone company PrecisionHawk, Denisenko positions Knox as a challenger to Palantir's FedStart, backed by Felicis Ventures and roughly $31.5M in total funding.
Joseph Connor
Joseph Connor is the founder and CEO of Odyssey, a New York based technology company that helps states run school choice programs like education savings accounts (ESAs). A former classroom teacher at KIPP and Rocketship who went on to Notre Dame Law School and worked on the landmark Espinoza v. Montana Supreme Court case, Connor built Odyssey to make public education dollars easy for families to access. The platform has helped more than 140,000 students across seven states tap into over $375 million in state funding, and raised a $10 million Series A in 2024 led by Tusk Venture Partners with backing from a16z's Katherine Boyle.
Ian Kalin
Ian Kalin is the CEO and co-founder of TurbineOne, a San Francisco defense-technology company building the Frontline Perception System - machine learning that runs on the sensor at the tactical edge, without the cloud, so warfighters can spot threats in real time. A Georgetown-trained politics major turned Navy nuclear engineer and counter-terrorism officer, Kalin later became the first Chief Data Officer of the U.S. Department of Commerce and a Presidential Innovation Fellow before building the product he says he wishes he'd had while serving. TurbineOne has raised more than $55M, holds 20+ Department of Defense contracts, and works across the Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps in the Indo-Pacific.
Jarren Reid
Jarren Reid is the 21-year-old CEO and co-founder of Usul, a Y Combinator (S24) startup building an AI platform that helps companies find, pursue, and win government contracts. Usul monitors roughly $8 trillion in annual government spending across 60+ nations, matching companies to opportunities in defense, IT, energy, and healthcare. Reid worked for defense contractors including Palantir and MITRE while still young, dropped out of Stanford to build Usul after seeing how broken the acquisition process was, and has become one of the youngest CEOs working with the U.S. government today.
Kris Sandor
Kris Sandor is the co-founder and CEO of Readyly, an agentic AI platform automating customer support and public services for governments and enterprises. A former U.S. Navy nuclear submarine officer turned McKinsey consultant, Palantir business lead, and CEO of Citi Bike (acquired by Lyft in 2018), he now builds AI agents that replace decision-tree chatbots across voice, chat, and email.
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.
August Chen
August Chen is the co-founder and CEO of Hazel, a Y Combinator-backed startup building AI-native procurement software for U.S. federal, state, and local government. A Harvard mechanical engineering and computer science graduate who built wildfire-prevention software at Palantir, Chen now aims his company at the $2.7 trillion public procurement market, helping overworked civil servants draft compliant solicitations in five minutes instead of five months. Hazel counts customers from K-12 school districts to the U.S. Navy and, in 2025, signed the City of Dallas as the first major Texas city to adopt AI for procurement.
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.
James Brown
James Brown is the co-founder and CEO of Schemata, a San Francisco startup building an AI-powered spatial intelligence platform that turns ordinary 2D imagery into photorealistic 3D environments with a built-in AI instructor. A former US Marine Corps infantry and information operations officer who once briefed the Secretary of the Navy, he was the first in his family to earn a college degree, went on to a Stanford MBA and MS in Symbolic Systems, and now sells rapid-deployment virtual training to defense, energy, and infrastructure customers. Schemata emerged from stealth in May 2025 with a $5M seed round led by Owl Ventures and $3.4M in early Department of Defense contracts.
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.
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.
Nikhil Reddy
Nikhil Reddy is the co-founder and CEO of Kaizen, a New York based civic technology company building modern, people-first software for America's public services. After stints engineering at Tesla, Anduril, and Archive Resale and a degree from UC Berkeley, he set out to replace the clunky legacy systems behind recreation sign-ups, permits, transit fares, DMVs, and licensing. Kaizen's platform now reaches more than 30 million residents across 17 states and 50-plus agencies, and has raised over $35 million from NEA, Accel, Andreessen Horowitz's American Dynamism practice, and others. Outside the company he runs a YouTube channel with 36,000+ subscribers about life, technology, and ideas.
Troy LeCaire
Troy LeCaire is the co-founder and CEO of GovWell, a New York startup building an AI operating system for local government - the permits, licenses, and inspections that quietly run a town. Before writing a line of code, he and CTO Ben Cohen cold-called hundreds of municipalities and lined up five paying customers. By 2026 GovWell served 130+ municipalities across 34 states and raised a $25M Series A led by Insight Partners, with zero churn on live customers and processing times cut by up to 95%.