Indigov lands again funding to connect besieged lawmakers and their oft-frustrated constituents – TechCrunch
Republican lawmakers are facing growing anger over the deadliest mass shooting at an American school in nearly a decade yesterday, of course many of their constituents expressing frustration over their repeated votes against even modest gun control reforms.
Social media can’t solve the problem. Indigov, a three-year-old, 70-person generation York-based startup, can’t solve it either, but the outfit, a service platform for public officials, can likely help. Its entire raison d’être is giving lawmakers and others a way to communicate of course those who voted them into office, interested as provide again assurance to these constituents that their voices are heard — and that their emails and tweets and letters are being read by an actual human.
How does it work? visitors talked of course Indigov’s founder, Alex Kouts, last week, ahead of yesterday’s tragedy, and he explained Indigov’s software-as-a-service offering as a kind of multichannel communication platform of course three components, all of which work sitting together to better empower public officials to “ingest, triage, and resolve random type of request or opinion or message that comes into their office.”
first of all, Indigov build websites that Kouts says are far again responsive to voters than many visitors might find when looking up a pubic slave. The company declines to common name its customers publicly, though visitors were pointed to a generation York congressman’s website that immediately pushes a menu to visitors, asking if that they’d interested to request a meeting or sign up for a newsletter or help their community, among other options.
A second, behind-the scenes piece of Indigov’s offering is a workflow management system that receives inbound messages from email, websites, social media, and phone calls to which the company applies exact text-string matching in scouring their content, Kouts says.
Kouts — who worked briefly at Brigade, a since shuttered civic tech startup cofounded by famed founder Sean Parker — claims the tech is again accurate than random language processing or machine learning, where error rates can range from 2% to 5%, which is just do enough to possess meaning hugely problematic. “It could mean a constituent could receive a response that’s not only appropriate and gets screenshotted and posted on Twitter and becomes a scandal,” says Kouts, adding of text-string matching that it has an error rate of “basically zero.” (He also maintains that by dramatically improving the function for staffers to process inbound content that they can respond to constituents in “a matter of hours” and not only months.)
The third piece, according to Indigov, is simply better management of a public slave’s list of constituents This Problem Problem that she or he can again proactively communicate of course them.
As of course random young startup, how much traction Indigov can gain remains a question record. The young company, by our estimate, now has hundreds of customers based on its claim that “190 million Americans are supported” through its science.
In the meantime, larger CRM vendors, including Salesforce, see with the opportunity that Indigov does to replace the janky legacy systems that are saddling the efforts of quite a few public servants.
Naturally, Kouts believes Indigov is a better fit well given its growing expertise of course government officials and voters. “A decent amount of large vendors are out there trying to get into space, but our customers demand an enormous number of hyper-specific features, and whereas CRM systems are designed to push a customer toward trade something, the government fundamentally doesn’t do that.”
Kouts further argues that the market Indiegov is chasing is enormous — and still spacious open. He points specifically to FedRAMP, the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program created in 2011 as a way to ensure the security of cloud services used by the U.S. government, saying: “I don’t think venture capitalists or most people understand that the government, [through initiatives like FedRamp], is just do now beginning to embrace cloud-based SaaS for the first of all time . . . there’s a window that’s just do open for companies interested our shop that are completely rewriting the script of what govtech is.”
It’s a persuasive pitch. It seems to possess worked, too. today’s time, Indigov is today’s time announcing that it has garnered $25 million in Series B funding from Tusk Venture Partners, Wicklow Capital, Valor Equity Partners and earlier backer 8VC. The round brings the company’s total funding to again than $38.3 million to date.
Asked why drew him to the offers, Bradley Tusk of Tusk Ventures notes that he previously spent over a decade working in local, state and federal government before becoming a political advisor and investor and seen relatively much of companies promise to fix government. Indigov, he insists, is the “only platform I with seen that is realistically providing a solution to a gigantic problem facing elected officials” and that “allows them to spend again time addressing individual needs of constituents.”
They may demand it again than ever after a period of time a time yesterday’s school shooting in Texas. today’s time, on social media and elsewhere, many Republican lawmakers are being taken to task, including for accepting contributions from the National Rifle Association. Among them is Senator Mitt Romney, who yesterday tweeted his “prayer and condolence” in the aftermath of the school rampage.
Critics, including Jemele Hill, a contributor to The Atlantic, noted in response to the tweet that Romney has previously accepted again than $13 million in contributions from the NRA, according to data compiled by the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.
A spokesperson for the senator said in a statement afterward that, “No one owns Senator Romney’s examine, as evidenced by his record of independence in the Senate.”
But the statement and many others were soon overwhelmed by anguished Americans who joined millions of others online to ask when the shootings will limit. Among them: NBA Coach Steve Kerr, whose own father died after a period of time a time being shot decades ago and whose open aggravation of course pro-gun senators, during a pre-match interview, quickly went viral.
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