Our Investment in ClearGov
How financial reporting and data visualization are helping local democracy thrive
If you’ve ever tried to closely examine your town or school district’s budget, there’s a good chance that you walked away frustrated. Digging through government websites to find the right reports can be difficult enough — interpreting the data within can be confusing and maddeningly time-consuming.
Many municipalities and school districts struggle to effectively communicate their financial health to citizens. Most focus on keeping up with their basic reporting requirements but decline to take the extra step to make the data easily digestible for the public. After all, constantly producing beautiful reports would be time-consuming and expensive for most local governments to do in-house. Many officials adopt the very sensible attitude that although it’s critical to get the numbers right, it’s a luxury to create detailed benchmarks and beautiful graphs.
Unfortunately, the resulting lack of clear financial information often leaves even highly engaged citizens confused. It can also impair officials’ ability to make well-informed financial decisions on behalf of their governments and school districts.
ClearGov CEO Chris Bullock and his co-founder, President Bryan Burdick, teamed up to tackle this problem head on.
ClearGov is a transparency and benchmarking platform for local governments and school districts. It helps its customers better communicate complex financial data through clear, easy-to-understand infographics. It also provides benchmarks so that officials and citizens alike can better evaluate specific aspects of their towns’ finances.
Chris and Bryan soon discovered just how thrilled local officials can be when they gain access to informative and clear financial reports. When armed with ClearGov, officials can spend less time wading through long and muddled documents, and they can have more meaningful discussions with better-informed (and less frustrated!) constituents. Officials can also use ClearGov’s benchmarks to identify risks and opportunities that they may have otherwise missed.
At LaunchCapital, we think that ClearGov’s mission to improve government transparency is especially important in today’s environment. Municipal finances in many parts of the country are under enormous pressure, citizen engagement is historically high, and many local newspapers — the traditional interpreters of towns’ fiscal health — have shuttered. Those factors make ClearGov’s value proposition even more compelling than it otherwise would be.
We wholeheartedly endorse Chris and Bryan’s mission. Even more impressive, though, is the fact that they are creating an extraordinarily healthy and high-growth company to make their vision a reality.
Chris and Bryan have assembled a strong team of experts who share their enthusiasm for making ClearGov a success. We believe that this team has built an excellent product in a badly underserved market. The company’s stellar sales growth and the glowing feedback that we’ve consistently heard from customers has only strengthened our confidence in this view.
Towns and school districts across the country are recognizing the power of ClearGov’s platform. Today, the company’s customers include more than 400 municipalities across 16 states. We’re thrilled to support the ClearGov team, and we can hardly wait to see what’s in store for both the company and the future of municipal financial transparency.
We’re also honored to join an incredibly smart and committed group of co-investors including RiverPark Ventures, Hub Angels Investment Group, Kepha Partners, and MassVentures.
You can find ClearGov on Twitter @cleargovcom. If you’re excited about ClearGov’s mission and interested in joining their growing team, you can check out their hiring needs on LaunchCapital’s job board.
