OpenGov

History

OpenGov was founded in 2012 by Zachary Bookman, Nate Levine, Dakin Sloss, Mike Rosengarten and Joe Lonsdale. The company's founders and several advisors met while working with California Common Sense, a non-profit non-partisan organization, which advocates open data and open government principles. Until 2013, the company was known as Delphi Solutions.

Products

Through its Smart Government Platform, OpenGov offers a complete suite of software products, all designed to enable public agencies to make data-driven decisions, improve budgeting and planning, and inform elected officials and citizens. According to the company's website, the platform complements traditional accounting and enterprise resource planning systems by providing user-friendly access to data.

OpenGov Intelligence

OpenGov Intelligence is a cloud-based reporting and data visualization solution that displays an individual government's financial and non-financial data, including its revenues and expenditures by fund, department, and type of account. The product lets departments track their spending against budget, monitor the financial status of capital improvement projects, and explore revenue trends. Users can view the data in a variety of interactive graphs and tables, as well as download or share the data through email or social media.

OpenGov Budget Builder

OpenGov Budget Builder is a collaborative budgeting tool for governments. Individual departments collaborate on and submit budget proposals. Then, budget administrators, finance directors, and department heads access and evaluate proposals in one central location.

OpenGov Transparency

OpenGov Transparency visualizes government financial and nonfinancial data, allowing the public to drill down into graphs and tables. This product also includes saved views that answer common questions, annotations, maps, and performance dashboards. This product is like OpenGov Intelligence, but only consists of the public-facing capabilities.

OpenGov Open Data

OpenGov Open Data, powered by enterprise-ready CKAN, delivers public data to civic developers, businesses, and citizens. This solution provides a hosted and managed CKAN instance with customizable portals.

Customers

As of December 2016, OpenGov serves over 1300 government entities (including state agencies, city governments, school districts, and other special districts) in 47 states, Washington, D.C., and Canada.

Municipalities

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

Following the City of Bell scandal involving the misappropriation of city funds, the Bell city government began using OpenGov in October 2013 as part of a larger initiative to rebuild trust between the city and residents.

Other notable municipality customers include Washington, D.C., the City of San Diego, the City of McKinney, and the City of Newark.

Counties

Notable county customers of OpenGov include Allegheny County, PA, Maricopa County, AZ, and Anoka County, MN.

States

Ohio State Treasurer Josh Mandel launched OhioCheckbook.com with OpenGov in early December 2014. Ohio was one of the first states in the country to use a searchable, machine readable checkbook for transactions. The Treasurer’s Office allows local governments to place their checkbook level data on OhioCheckbook.com at no cost to the agencies themselves. These local governments include cities, counties, townships, schools, library districts and other special districts.

In 2016, the Colorado Department of the Treasury implemented OpenGov to explore and report on its debt obligations from a central system.

Schools and Special Districts

Notable OpenGov school and special district customers include the Menlo Park City School District, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, and the Jackson County Water and Sewerage Authority in Georgia.

Board Members

OpenGov’s board consists of Co-Founder & Chairman Joe Lonsdale, Co-Founder & CEO Zac Bookman, Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz, and Cisco Executive Chairman John Chambers.

Advisors

OpenGov is advised by experts from the technology, financial, and public service sectors. Examples include:

Funding

OpenGov has raised $47 million from venture capital and angel investors. A $3 million Series A round in 2012 included venture funds 8VC, Founder Collective, Valiant Capital, and "a number of high-profile angel investors." In 2013, the company raised $4 million in further investment from 8VC and new investor Thrive Capital.

On May 15, 2014, OpenGov announced a new $15 million Series B round of funding including investments from Andreessen Horowitz, 8VC, SGVC, Streamlined Ventures, Sway Ventures, and Thrive Capital.

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. Marc Andreessen was also added to the board during the October 15, 2015 round.

Acquisitions

OpenGov acquired Ontodia, a leading developer of Open Data CKAN solutions, in April 2016. The acquisition has allowed OpenGov to build out its offerings, adding a managed open data CKAN solution and dashboards to the OpenGov Smart Government Platform.