OpenGov

Last updated

OpenGov Inc.
Company type Private
Industry Enterprise software
Founded2012;12 years ago (2012)
Founders
Headquarters
San Francisco, California, U.S.
Key people
Zac Bookman (CEO) [1]
Products
  • ERP cloud
  • budgeting & planning
  • financials
  • citizen services
Number of employees
c. 700 (2024) [2]
Website opengov.com

OpenGov Inc. is a government technology company that offers cloud software for public sector accounting, planning, budgeting, citizen services, and procurement. OpenGov serves over 1,000 cities, counties, and state agencies across 49 states. In February 2024, minority owner Cox Enterprises agreed to acquire the company.

Contents

History

OpenGov, which is headquartered in San Francisco, [1] was founded in 2012 by Nate Levine, Dakin Sloss, Joe Lonsdale, and Zachary Bookman in response to the 2008 financial crisis. [3] The company's founders and several advisors met while working with California Common Sense, a non-profit non-partisan organization, which advocates for open data and open government principles. The group founded OpenGov with the long-term goal of bringing a modern cloud enterprise resource planning (ERP) to local and state governments.

In April 2016, OpenGov acquired Ontodia, a leading developer of Open data CKAN, allowing OpenGov to expand its Reporting & Transparency suite. [4]

In February 2017, OpenGov said that it saw an increase in interest from clients and job applicants related to desire for increased government accountability after the election of President Donald Trump. [5]

The Wall Street Journal reported that OpenGov, a government technology start-up whose CEO attended a tech summit at the White House in June 2017, is part owned by Thrive Capital — a venture firm run by Jared Kushner's brother, Joshua. [6] OpenGov’s CEO, Zac Bookman was the only chief executive of a small firm among the 18 tech leaders to get a seat at the table with the president. [6] According to the Wall Street Journal, a staff member suggested OpenGov participate after learning about the company in previous congressional roles. [6]

In October 2017, OpenGov acquired government-serving tech company, Peak Democracy of Berkeley, California, [7] [8] to expand its public engagement, communication, and feedback tools.

In September 2019, OpenGov acquired ViewPoint Cloud, a platform used by city and state governments to manage community development operations, such as permitting, licensing, inspections, and code enforcement. [9]

In March 2020, OpenGov and GTY Technology Holdings settled lawsuits related to a past effort at a merger. [10]

In April 2020, OpenGov launched the first fully-integrated cloud enterprise resource planning (ERP) system designed specifically for local government. [11]

In October 2020, OpenGov acquired ClearRec, a Texas-based company, to incorporate its step-by-step bank reconciliation process technology into the OpenGov ERP Cloud. [12]

In June 2021, OpenGov acquired ProcureNow to enable its customers to run budgeting, procurement and financial operations through the same vendor. [13]

In July 2022, OpenGov acquired Cartegraph, a public cloud software developer, with funding from Cox Enterprises. [14]

In February 2024, minority owner Cox Enterprises agreed to acquire OpenGov, valuing the company at $1.8 billion. [1] [2]

Customers

As of February 2024, OpenGov serves 1,900 government entities, [2] including state agencies, city governments, school districts, and other special districts. They offer subscriptions to these entities based on the number of products used and the number of employees who need access. [2]

The city of Palo Alto was OpenGov's first customer, [15] following a collaboration between the city and employees from nonprofit California Common Sense to launch a comprehensive open data platform. [16]

Following a chain of cyberattacks and scandals, the city of Scranton, Pennsylvania, partnered up with OpenGov to use its cloud based ERP to restore public trust, improve safety, and accelerate the city's operations. The city's Business Administrator, Karl Deeley, stated that Scranton's operations had not undergone any major changes since the 1980s, so its partnership with OpenGov will enable the city to decrease reliance on its old infrastructure. [17]

In May 2021, Curry County, Oregon, stopped using OpenGov due to "glitches" in the software. [18]

In September 2021, the municipality of Durango, Colorado, announced its partnership with OpenGov to increase transparency with its citizens by allowing them to view the city's finances, as well as the spending of other government entities, real time. The effort to increase transparency came after Durango's former finance director, Julie Brown, was caught embezzling over $700,000 across 11 years. Durango also lost millions of dollars through clerical errors in 2019, which OpenGov's software could reduce and prevent down the road. [19]

As of February 2024, OpenGov is being used by the city of Los Angeles to prepare for the 2028 Summer Olympics. [1]

Funding

OpenGov has raised $128 million from venture capital and angel investors.[ citation needed ] A $3 million Series A round in 2012 included venture funds 8VC, Founder Collective, Valiant Capital, and "a number of high-profile angel investors." [20] In 2013, the company raised $4 million in further investment from 8VC and new investor Thrive Capital. [20]

On May 15, 2014, OpenGov announced a new $15 million Series B round of funding including investments from Andreessen Horowitz, 8VC, and Thrive Capital. [21]

An additional $25 million Series B round in October 2015 included additional investments from Andreessen Horowitz, 8VC, Thrive Capital, and Sway Ventures, as well as new investors Glynn Capital, Scott Cook, and Ashton Kutcher and Guy Oseary’s Sound Ventures. [22] Marc Andreessen was also added to the board during the October 2015 round. [22]

In May 2017, the company raised $30 million in a Series C founding round [23] and in September 2019, the startup picked up an additional $51 million in a Series D round led by Weatherford Capital and 8VC (Lonsdale's investment firm), with participation from existing investor Andreessen Horowitz. [24]

In mid-August 2021, Weatherford Capital, a private investment firm in Florida, closed nearly $355 million in its first round of investments for the government technology space, with OpenGov being one of the multiple civic technology companies that received a portion of the investments. [25]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Marc Andreessen</span> American entrepreneur, investor, and software engineer (born 1971)

Marc Lowell Andreessen is an American businessman and former software engineer. He is the co-author of Mosaic, the first widely used web browser with a graphical user interface; co-founder of Netscape; and co-founder and general partner of Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He co-founded and later sold the software company Opsware to Hewlett-Packard; he also co-founded Ning, a company that provides a platform for social networking websites. He is an inductee in the World Wide Web Hall of Fame. Andreessen's net worth is estimated at $1.7 billion.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Workday, Inc.</span> American software company

Workday, Inc., is an American on‑demand (cloud-based) financial management, human capital management, and student information system software vendor. Workday was founded by David Duffield, founder and former CEO of ERP company PeopleSoft, along with former PeopleSoft chief strategist Aneel Bhusri, following Oracle's acquisition of PeopleSoft in 2005.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">NetSuite</span> Technology company

NetSuite Inc. is an American cloud-based enterprise software company that provides products and services tailored for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) including accounting and financial management, customer relationship management, inventory management, human capital management, payroll, procurement, project management and e-commerce software. NetSuite was founded in 1998 with headquarters in Austin, Texas. The company is widely seen as the first cloud computing software company, with its founding pre-dating that of Salesforce by about a month.

Acumatica provides cloud and browser based enterprise resource planning software for small and medium-sized businesses. The company is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington, in the Seattle metropolitan area.

Andreessen Horowitz is a private American venture capital firm, founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. The company is headquartered in Menlo Park, California. As of April 2023, Andreessen Horowitz ranks first on the list of venture capital firms by assets under management, with $42 billion as of May 2024.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joe Lonsdale</span> American entrepreneur and venture capitalist

Joseph Lonsdale is an American entrepreneur and venture capitalist. He co-founded Palantir Technologies, Addepar, and OpenGov, and co-founded and serves as the managing partner at the technology investment firm 8VC.

Workday Adaptive Planning, formerly Adaptive Insights, is a software as a service company founded in 2003 and headquartered in Palo Alto, California. The company was acquired by Workday, Inc. in a $1.55 billion deal completed in August 2018.

Meteor, or MeteorJS, is a partly proprietary, mostly free and open-source isomorphic JavaScript web framework written using Node.js. Meteor allows for rapid prototyping and produces cross-platform code. The server-side MongoDB program is the only proprietary component of Meteor and is part of the Meteor download bundle. It is possible to use Meteor without using the server-side MongoDB. It uses the Distributed Data Protocol and a publish–subscribe pattern to automatically propagate data changes to clients without requiring the developer to write any synchronization code. On the client, Meteor can be used with any popular front-end JS framework, Vue, React, Svelte, Angular, or Bazel.

CipherCloud is an American software company providing cloud computing security to businesses. The company was established in 2010 and is based out of San Jose, California.

Wickr is an American software company based in New York City, known for its instant messenger application with the same name. The Wickr instant messaging apps allow users to exchange end-to-end encrypted and content-expiring messages, and are designed for iOS, Android, Mac, Windows, and Linux operating systems. Wickr was acquired by Amazon Web Services (AWS) mid-2021. They discontinued the free version of the app in December 2023.

Apptio, Inc. is a Bellevue, Washington-based company founded in 2007 that develops technology business management (TBM) software as a service (SaaS) applications. Apptio enterprise apps are designed to assess and communicate the cost of IT services for planning, budgeting and forecasting purposes; Apptio's services offer tools for CIOs to manage technology departments' storage, applications, energy usage, cybersecurity, and reporting obligations; manage the costs of public cloud, migration to public cloud and SaaS portfolios; and adopt and scale Agile across the enterprise.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">GoodData</span> US-based BI & analytics company

GoodData is a software company headquartered in San Francisco, California, in the U.S., with additional offices in Europe and Asia.

Panaya is a global technology company based in Hod Hasharon, Israel. The company is a subsidiary of Infosys, and has offices in North America, Europe and Japan. It is a SaaS based company certified by SAP, Oracle and Salesforce.com, offering an all-in-one platform for Smart Testing solutions and Change Intelligence, tailored for Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and cloud-business applications.

Runa Capital is an international venture capital firm headquartered in Luxembourg that invests in deep tech, enterprise software, and fintech infractructure early-stage startups. From 2010 through 2022, Runa Capital raised around $500 million in 4 funds and invested in over 100 companies in more than 14 countries of Europe and North America, including Nginx, MariaDB, Zopa, Brainly, drchrono, Smava, and Mambu.

Snowflake Inc. is an American cloud computing–based data cloud company based in Bozeman, Montana. It was founded in July 2012 and was publicly launched in October 2014 after two years in stealth mode.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gigster</span> American dot-com company

Gigster provides a service that allows users to get tech projects built on demand. It was co-founded by Roger Dickey and Debo Olaosebikan and based in San Francisco, California. They received seed funding from Greylock Partners, Bloomberg Beta, as well as notable angel investors and founders Naval Ravikant of AngelList, Justin Waldron of Zynga, and Emmett Shear of Twitch, among others. They were a part of Y-Combinator's Summer 2015 class.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Carta (software company)</span> American software company

eShares, Inc., doing business as Carta, Inc., is a San Francisco, California-based technology company that specializes in capitalization table management and valuation software. The company digitizes paper stock certificates along with stock options, warrants, and derivatives to allow companies, investors, and employees to manage their equity and track company ownership. The company also operates CartaX, a private stock exchange.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sage Intacct</span> American financial software company

Sage Intacct, Inc is an American provider of cloud-based accounting software and services available a number of regions around the globe – including the United States, Canada, the UK, Australia, and South Africa. Its products offer cloud-based accounting applications that enable business payments, manage and pay bills, and facilitate payroll functions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Netlify</span> American cloud computing company

Netlify is a remote-first cloud computing company that offers a development platform that includes build, deploy, and serverless backend services for web applications and dynamic websites.

Samsara Inc. is an American IoT company headquartered in San Francisco, California that provides software and insights for physical operations. The company has customers across North America and Europe. Samsara developed a connected operations cloud platform that provides insights to physical operations organizations in the transportation, construction, energy, utilities, public sector and retail industries, and supports the safety and efficiency of those operations.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 Thomas, Lauren (February 26, 2024). "Cox Enterprises Strikes $1.8 Billion Deal for Government-Software Provider" . The Wall Street Journal. Archived from the original on February 27, 2024.
  2. 1 2 3 4 Trubey, J. Scott (February 27, 2024). "Cox Enterprises buys majority stake in government software firm OpenGov" . The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Archived from the original on February 28, 2024.
  3. ↑ Delisle, Mckenzie (October 30, 2019). "Plattsburgh, N.Y., Inks Deal with OpenGov Budgeting Software". GovTech. Retrieved October 25, 2021.
  4. ↑ Lunden, Ingrid (April 13, 2016). "OpenGov acquires Ontodia to add open-sourced data to its civic intelligence platform". TechCrunch. Retrieved December 15, 2016.
  5. ↑ Kendall, Marisa (February 19, 2017). "Bay Area civic affairs startups see Trump-era boom". Marin Independent Journal. Retrieved August 12, 2024.
  6. 1 2 3 Eaglesham, Jean; Schwartz, Lisa (July 14, 2017). "Startup That Got a Seat at White House Roundtable Is Part-Owned by Kushner Family". The Wall Street Journal . Retrieved August 12, 2024.
  7. ↑ Miller, Ben (October 20, 2017). "Exclusive: OpenGov Acquires Peak Democracy, Aims for Citizen Feedback Across Product Lines". GovTech. Retrieved November 17, 2017.
  8. ↑ Shueh, Jason (October 25, 2017). "OpenGov expands the meaning of transparency with latest acquisition". StateScoop. Retrieved June 19, 2018.
  9. ↑ Lunden, Ingrid (September 5, 2019). "OpenGov acquires ViewPoint Cloud, to add licensing and permitting functionality to its platform". TechCrunch. Retrieved March 26, 2020.
  10. ↑ Miller, Ben (March 13, 2020). "GTY Pays OpenGov $5.8M to Settle Lawsuits Regarding Merger". GovTech. Retrieved August 12, 2024.
  11. ↑ "OpenGov Completes Cloud ERP Suite with Accounting Software". GovTech. April 28, 2020.
  12. ↑ "OpenGov Acquires ClearRec for Government Accounting Software". GovTech. October 14, 2020. Retrieved March 29, 2021.
  13. ↑ Miller, Ben (June 23, 2021). "OpenGov Jumps Into Procurement With Startup Acquisition". GovTech. Retrieved September 13, 2021.
  14. ↑ Drew Kann (July 29, 2022). "Cloud software acquisition completed with Cox Enterprises investment". The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Retrieved July 31, 2022.
  15. ↑ Hepler, Lauren (October 5, 2012). "Delphi builds data tool for Palo Alto". Silicon Valley Business Journal. Retrieved January 8, 2014.
  16. ↑ "City of Palo Alto Continues Open Government Push with Launch of "Open Budget"". HighBeam Research. September 21, 2012. Archived from the original on June 10, 2014. Retrieved January 8, 2014.
  17. ↑ Edinger, Julia (May 28, 2021). "After Hack and Scandal, Scranton, Pa., Focuses on Cloud ERP". GovTech. Retrieved October 25, 2021.
  18. ↑ Keranan, Knox (May 8, 2021). "County abandons OpenGov software". Curry Pilot. Retrieved August 12, 2024.
  19. ↑ Johnson, Nicholas A. (September 17, 2021). "Durango to launch transparent OpenGov budget resource next week". Durango Herald. Retrieved October 25, 2021.
  20. 1 2 Deutscher, Maria (July 3, 2013). "OpenGov Receives $4M for Transparency Software". SiliconANGLE. Retrieved January 8, 2014.
  21. ↑ Cheredar, Tom (May 16, 2014). "OpenGov has another $15M to show how governments spend your money". VentureBeat. Retrieved August 12, 2024.
  22. 1 2 Buhr, Sarah (October 15, 2015). "OpenGov Picks Up $25 Million More And Adds Marc Andreessen To The Board". TechCrunch. Retrieved December 15, 2016.
  23. ↑ Miller, Ben (May 16, 2017). "OpenGov Raises $30M in Series C Round, Plans More Product Launches". GovTech. Retrieved August 12, 2024.
  24. ↑ Lunden, Ingrid (September 3, 2019). "OpenGov raises $51M to boost its cloud-based IT services for government and civic organizations". TechCrunch. Retrieved August 12, 2024.
  25. ↑ Rueter, Thad (August 19, 2021). "Weatherford Raises $355M for Gov Tech and Other Investments". GovTech. Retrieved October 25, 2021.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.