public-sector
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Shyam Salona and the Case for Staying Small
He started REI Systems in a townhouse basement with Veer Bhartiya in 1989. Decades later, Shyam Salona is still working on the same question: how do you grow a company without losing the small teams that made it worth building?
Damir Davidovic and the four-year wait for ten customers
Before NEOGOV reached thousands of public institutions, Damir Davidovic spent years earning their trust. His route from Croatia to California eventually led back to Split, this time with software jobs to fill.
Veer Bhartiya knew when to say no
A contract could have tripled his young company. He and his co-founder passed. The decision helps explain how an engineer from India built a working life around keeping promises.
Omar E. Hernandez and the Distance Between a Grant and a Paycheck
From South Central Los Angeles to municipal council chambers, Omar E. Hernandez has built a career around getting public projects moving. His story turns on the work that comes after a good idea: finding money, reaching people, and accounting for what happens next.
Richard Pennington and the promise that got bigger
FourNet began with four founders and one customer. Twenty-one years later, Richard Pennington is steering a business of around £65 million towards AI, with the same awkward question at its heart: who takes responsibility when the technology has to work?
Chris Morrissey and the work before the big moment
From the Canada Winter Games to seaweed biotechnology and provincial investment, Chris Morrissey has made a career of getting complicated plans ready for the real world.
John Gill and the value of taking the long way round
A school-bus route, a disputed council explanation, a career inside public finance. Former Datacom executive John Gill keeps returning to a practical question: does the story survive a check against the facts?
Zhensen Huang Spent a Decade in the Quiet Part of Building
Before the awards, the contracts and the AI workshops, Precise Software Solutions was a two-person company with a long runway and no obvious breakthrough. Huang's useful lesson is what happened during the wait.
Ranjit Bahia
Ranjit Bahia is the founder and CEO of Cyferd, a New York-headquartered AI-led digital transformation platform he launched in 2021 to attack the siloed-data problem that defines most enterprise software. Before Cyferd, he ran RoxAI, whose Ping alerting engine was acquired by Qlik in 2020, after which he spent a year at Qlik as Senior Director of Strategic Business Development. Cyferd's Neural Genesis AI engine now powers workflows across healthcare, higher education, housing, procurement, legal, and sports management, with clients including the NHS, De Montfort University, and Leicester Riders.
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.
Naren Kini
Naren Kini is the CEO and co-founder of Global Touchpoints Inc., a California-based IT services and consulting firm he built organically over 20+ years to 150+ employees and $15M+ in annual revenue — entirely without outside capital. Starting from a background in industrial engineering and early stints at Hinditron and Syntel, Kini built Touchpoints into a trusted partner for Fortune 500 companies like Meta, Intuit, and Fiserv, as well as California state government agencies, specializing in Salesforce, AWS, data analytics, AI consulting, and managed services.
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%.
Jennie Strobeck
Jennie Strobeck is AVP of State & Local Sales, Digital Media at Adobe, where she leads government sales strategy across city, county, and state agencies. With a career spanning enterprise tech sales at DLT Solutions, immixGroup, and Avaya Government Solutions, she has spent over two decades at the intersection of technology and public sector transformation. At Adobe, she previously served as Chief of Staff and Channel Sales Manager before stepping into the AVP role in 2022. She is particularly focused on digital accessibility, helping governments meet DOJ WCAG compliance requirements and modernize document workflows at scale.
Kees Hertogh
Kees Hertogh is Vice President of Public Sector & Healthcare Marketing at Microsoft, based in Redmond, Washington. A Netherlands-born executive who joined Microsoft via the 2002 Navision acquisition, he has spent over two decades at the company rising from product management on Microsoft Dynamics AX through to VP-level leadership over the global marketing strategy for Microsoft's healthcare, life sciences, education, and government verticals. He is the primary public face of Microsoft Dragon Copilot - the AI clinical workflow assistant reaching 100,000+ clinicians - and a prolific industry blogger and conference speaker on responsible AI in healthcare.
Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins
Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins is the co-founder and CEO of Promise, an Oakland-based govtech company valued at $520 million that helps municipalities and utilities offer zero-interest payment plans to struggling residents. A former union organizer turned labor federation executive turned music manager for Prince, she now runs a platform that has reached 5 million+ households across 20+ states, proving that treating people with dignity is not just ethical — it is a business model. Named #247 on the Forbes Self-Made 250, she built Promise from a YC Winter 2018 bet to a $23 million-funded company generating $33M+ in annual revenue.
Christian Hugo
Christian Hugo is the CEO of GovData Services Limited, a Warrington-based consultancy he has led since 2006 that helps British businesses - especially SMEs - access the £378 billion annual UK government procurement market. With over 30 years in the public sector space, Hugo played a role in the creation of G-Cloud, the UK's largest IT procurement framework, and has helped clients win over £40 billion in public sector contracts. A co-founder of Govnet Communications in 1997, he has built GovData into a firm that has guided more than 1,800 businesses through government framework submissions across IT, professional services, people, and buildings and infrastructure.
Hydra Mendoza
Hydra Mendoza is the VP and Chief of Strategic Relationships in the Office of the Chair and CEO at Salesforce, where she builds and stewards key stakeholder relationships across government, community, and corporate sectors. A native San Franciscan born to a Filipino military family, she made history as the first and only Filipina ever elected to office in San Francisco - serving three terms on the SF Unified School District Board. Her career spans community organizing, mayoral advising, school board leadership, and overseeing communications for the nation's largest public school system before joining Salesforce, where she co-architected the company's original educational investments alongside Marc Benioff.
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.
Valerio Adrián Anacleto
Valerio Adrián Anacleto is the co-founder and CEO of Epidata, Latin America's first innovation outsourcing company, which he built from a three-person startup in Buenos Aires in 2003 into a 900-person firm operating across 10 Latin American countries and the United States with $30M in annual revenue. A product of Argentina's public university system who started working at age 10 in the La Matanza district, Anacleto also serves as First Vice President of CESSI, Argentina's software industry chamber, and is a longtime professor at the University of Buenos Aires and Universidad Católica Argentina.
Jay Nath
Jay Nath is Co-CEO and co-founder of Authorium, an AI-powered government procurement and document workflow platform that processes over $50 billion in government transactions. Before Authorium, he served as San Francisco's first Chief Innovation Officer for nearly a decade, where he created landmark programs including Startup in Residence (STIR), Civic Bridge, and Open311 — the nation's first read-write open data standard for 311 systems, adopted by over 50 cities worldwide. Recognized by the Obama White House as a Champion of Change, Nath has spent his career bridging the gap between Silicon Valley agility and the scale of public sector impact.
Katie Jacobs Stanton
Katie Jacobs Stanton is the Founder and General Partner of Moxxie Ventures, a San Francisco-based seed-stage venture firm managing $95M+ across three funds. A former VP of Global Media at Twitter, Director of Citizen Participation at the Obama White House, and State Department innovation advisor, she built her reputation deploying technology at the intersection of government, media, and social change - including spearheading the Haiti earthquake text-donation platform that raised $40M in days. Co-founder of #Angels, a collective that has placed capital in 120+ companies, she now backs outlier founders across enterprise software, climate tech, and vertical AI.