Announcing Our Investment with LiveStories
by: John Connors
I started my career in 1984 in audit at Deloitte — yes, the era of green ledger paper — and one of our challenges was finding, assessing, and analyzing the data to understand the inputs and results of our clients’ businesses. As my career progressed to being the Corporate Controller, CIO, head of the Enterprise group and eventually CFO at Microsoft, I witnessed first-hand, and benefitted from, the evolution and innovation in tools and techniques that put the power of data in the hands of business leaders, teams and employees.
At Ignition Partners, we have invested in several companies that have fundamentally changed the way enterprises organize, access, and use their data, including Cloudera, Splunk and Trifacta. As these underlying technologies matured over the past decade, we’ve seen an explosion in startups that have democratized access to financial data, HR data, sales and customer data, and marketing data. Quite simply, data-driven decision making for enterprises is no longer an option — it is a requirement.
Throughout the years, however, one large segment of our economy has lagged: public sector. At over 30% of our GDP, government spending and programs impact us all. But accessing and using the data needed to understand these programs — particularly at the local and state level where the immediacy to all of us is the greatest — has remained elusive. Until now.
With this in mind, we were deeply intrigued when we met Adnan and the LiveStories team, which has built a platform that enables us to find, explore, and communicate civic data. Civic data consists of the facts that describe the conditions of how we live, learn, work and play. In fact, there is more civic data today than ever, but it isn’t accessible, normalized, or usable.
LiveStories has built a technically and economically efficient platform to ingest, clean, normalize, analyze and publish civic data — we think LiveStories is a game changer. We share the team’s vision to empower publishers and subscribers of data, including municipal and state government agencies, insurance companies, health care systems, other corporate buyers, and folks like you and me. Based on this incredible vision, team, product and very large unserved need, I am pleased to announce Ignition Partners is leading the Series A investment in LiveStories. I am honored to join the Board.
With 120+ customer since it launched the product two years ago, LiveStories is already building a sustainable business that benefits citizens across the country by enabling data transparency. We are excited to partner with Adnan and the team at LiveStories to help build a big, impactful company in the years to come.
