state-and-local-government
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The City Hall AI Nobody Approved
Public workers were using AI before their agencies had rules for it. Darwin AI built a way to see the tools, set guardrails and, in one Kentucky city, turn that caution into a two-minute fire schedule.
Hazel
Hazel is a New York-based startup building AI-native software for U.S. government procurement. Its platform helps state, local, and federal agencies define requirements, draft solicitations (RFPs, RFQs, RFBs), run market research, and evaluate vendor responses in one place - compressing a process that often takes months into days while keeping agencies compliant. Founded in 2024 by Harvard classmates August Chen and Elton Lossner and backed by Y Combinator, Hazel counts the City of Dallas, City of Atlanta, PhilaPort, and the U.S. Air Force among its early adopters.
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.
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.