On March 18, 2014, Tom Spengler had a rather direct form of customer feedback waiting for him in Manhattan Beach. The City Council was frustrated with its video streaming. The president and CEO of Granicus appeared during public comments to discuss the problems, the adjustments, and the fixes ahead.
He acknowledged the frustration. Hardware and software had been replaced. A fast-forward and rewind feature was scheduled for release to the city later that month. He defended city staff and described his company’s work with them. The discussion moved through upgrades, meeting lengths, and the relationship between minutes and video.
It is a useful scene with which to meet Spengler. Here was a founder whose business involved public accountability, standing in a public meeting to account for his product. A sales presentation can end when the slides do. A council meeting has other arrangements.
Three early years, three empty tills
Granicus began in 1999. Spengler built it with Emery Jones and Javier Muniz, and later recalled that the founders ran out of money in each of their first three years. The familiar founder story often hurries past this part on its way to an acquisition. Three repetitions deserve a little space.
Years later, he recognized something of that experience in Bratton Riley, the founder of Citibot. They met at an ICMA conference happy hour in 2018. At a subsequent conference, Riley occupied a speaking slot Spengler once held. Spengler admitted that watching someone else in his old place initially stung.
Then Riley spoke about customers and support. Spengler applauded. Informal conversations about the business followed, and eventually an investment. There is a small, appealing movement in that account: possessiveness gives way to recognition. Someone else has taken the microphone, and the old speaker decides to help.
A city clerk changes the product
The original Granicus had general-purpose streaming tools. Its decision to concentrate on city and county government gave those tools a particular job. Local agencies wanted residents to follow public meetings. The usual corporate arguments about saving travel expenses offered little help in explaining the purchase.
The company spent time with clerks, whose work exposed the difficulty inside that apparently simple proposition. A recording could last hours. Without an index, finding a particular decision meant hunting through it. Clerks were reviewing meetings they had already attended to connect the footage to the agenda.
Live indexing allowed them to mark agenda items during proceedings. Meeting minutes could also connect to the corresponding recording. The lesson was almost impolitely practical: making government visible required attention to the person doing the administrative work. A camera could capture the room. Someone still had to make the record usable.
Before the browser, a business education
Spengler’s education at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo combined business and industrial technology. Before Granicus, his consulting work at Andersen Consulting, now Accenture, included internet strategy and development assignments involving E-Trade and the United States Postal Service. His route into government software ran through the working machinery of the web.
He later wrote white papers about transparency and governing in the cloud, taught through the International Institute of Municipal Clerks, and served on the Municipal Clerks Education Foundation board. Those activities kept his professional world close to the people who prepare and preserve the public record.
When Propylon appointed him to its board in January 2018, the attraction included experience with government customers and the growth of a technology business. Legal and legislative software offered a familiar sort of complexity. The next opportunity was still somewhere near the paperwork.
The paper has a constituency
Paperwork was also literal. In 2012, Granicus promoted its Government Go Green Project, a voluntary pledge to reduce paper use in legislative work. More than 70 government entities had signed on. The commercial interest was evident: a company selling digital tools had reason to welcome fewer printed packets.
The benefits could be tangible. Multnomah County’s board clerk reported annual paper savings of $40,000 after the county moved board packets onto iPads. A meeting packet is a modest object until it is multiplied by recipients, revisions, and the next meeting. Then the modest object requires a budget.
Spengler also acknowledged the human obstacle: elected officials who preferred paper. A clerk could have the technology ready and still face the delicate task of persuading the people being served to change their habits. Software arrives with a feature list; adoption comes with personalities.
Annual paper savings reported by Multnomah County’s board clerk in 2012 after moving board packets onto iPads.
A public record with fewer loose ends
Another piece of the work appeared in 2012, when Laserfiche announced an expanded integration with Granicus. Legislative records and documents could move between systems with less duplication. The aim was to connect the creation of a record with its retention, rather than leave staff to stitch the lifecycle together.
That sort of announcement rarely supplies a thrilling photograph. It does explain much of the business. A public meeting creates obligations before anyone enters the chamber and after everyone leaves it. Documents need to be assembled, retained, and found again. Each handoff can become another task for someone.
Spengler’s stated goal was to reduce repeated effort across systems. Seen alongside the earlier work with clerks, the integration suggests a consistent interest: the seams between activities. Those seams are easy to overlook in a demonstration and harder to overlook during a working day.
The town hall in a spare minute
By 2013, Spengler was arguing that mobile devices should give residents a more useful role in government. He was impatient with digital question-and-answer sessions that let leaders choose a few questions while leaving the larger conversation untouched. Access to a screen did not automatically produce influence.
He described tools that could collect ideas, polls, and comments on agenda items, putting public feedback in front of legislators using mobile devices. The aspiration was participation that could reach a decision while the decision was still open. Timing mattered as much as transmission.
There is an ordinary kindness inside that ambition. Civic life competes with work, errands, and the rest of an evening. Requiring every interested person to appear at one place at one hour makes participation expensive in time. A usable digital record gives that person another opening.
The company he founded becomes the buyer
After Granicus, Spengler returned to legislative technology through PrimeGov, where he became executive chairman. In March 2021, Rock Solid Technology announced its acquisition of PrimeGov and named him CEO of the combined organization. Meeting management and resident engagement were being brought under the same roof.
The proposition was to bring community feedback and operational information closer to public decision-making. A resident’s interaction with local government could inform the meeting where priorities were debated. Spengler had spent years helping people follow the agenda. Now the ambition included more of what might shape it.
Public meetings, he said, were central to democratic life. The argument carried the same practical requirement as his earlier work: local staff and elected officials needed tools that let them do the job. The titles changed. The municipal customer remained.
An old competitor, a familiar problem
In May 2022, Rock Solid bought Swagit Productions, a business focused on livestreaming public meetings. Spengler was willing to explain what an alternative approach had achieved. Swagit had competed through service and automation, helping agencies handle work that could otherwise demand more technical attention.
Its capabilities included automated indexing, searchable archived video, clickable transcripts, and remote production controls. For an agency with limited staff, the service surrounding a recording could matter as much as the recording itself. The person running the meeting already had a meeting to run.
In October 2022, Granicus acquired Rock Solid. Spengler had led the seller; the buyer was the company he had co-founded. By then Rock Solid served more than 800 municipal customers across the United States, Latin America, and the Caribbean. His career had drawn a rather tidy circle around a complicated market.
- 1999Co-founds Granicus
- 2021Named Rock Solid CEO
- 2022Granicus buys Rock Solid
- 2025Becomes SOVRA CEO
Learning to sit on the other side of the table
In September 2023, he joined Great Hill Partners as an executive-in-residence, helping identify government technology investments. A founder accustomed to building one company could now assess several, bringing an operator’s familiarity with public-sector buying and the demands that follow a signed contract.
His board work also reached beyond city hall. Daxtra appointed him in August 2023, drawing on experience that included building Ascendify’s go-to-market function in recruitment technology. The recurring business questions concerned customers, distribution, teams, and the ways specialized software earns its place.
Yet investing did not permanently displace operating. When he returned to a CEO role, his own description emphasized the balance among customers, employee culture, and new products. After spending time helping choose businesses, he wanted the daily responsibility of building one again.
“Once a builder, always a builder!”
Tom Spengler, on returning to a CEO role
Back at work, this time on the purchase order
SOVRA appointed Spengler CEO in August 2025, succeeding Luc Filiatreault. He had already joined its board. The company, formerly MDF Commerce and backed by KKR, was concentrating its business on government technology, including procurement and capital planning. City hall’s buying process had become the next assignment.
The appointment came alongside the acquisition of Calgary-based Ontopical. Its technology helps suppliers identify prospective government opportunities before formal requests for proposals appear. SOVRA also sold six businesses outside its narrowed focus. The company was changing both what it owned and where it intended to spend its attention.
In August 2026, SOVRA added procurement technology executive Akhilesh Agarwal to its board. Spengler emphasized the pressure on agencies to accomplish more amid complex requirements and the potential for AI to help procurement teams. The ambition had acquired a new technology vocabulary, while the test remained practical: could a busy public employee get more useful work done?
Spengler greeted the return with six uncomplicated words: “Once a builder, always a builder!” His enthusiasm had a familiar address. Public meetings, public records, purchasing: different doors into the same institution, each with people trying to complete a task. After all the transactions, the work still depended on showing up.