After beginning with a 10-company cohort last year, CivStart’s 2020 class has 12. They work in a wide range of areas, including water utilities, civic engagement and human trafficking:
- Acta Solutions: Natural language processing to provide nuanced analysis of constituent input and feedback.
- Bloom Housing by Exygy: An extension of Exygy’s existing work helping San Francisco redesign its affordable housing application process, Bloom Housing is an open source project aiming to help governments digitize and streamline their systems while increasing transparency.
- CitizenLab: A “community engagement toolbox” for collecting input, managing the conversation and generating insights from it.
- ClearRoad: Offering a variety of transportation tools, including road use charging, next-generation tolling and dynamic mobility pricing.
- Collective Liberty: Using data, collaboration and training to fight human trafficking.
- Govlia: Software to help governments manage local preference and supplier diversity efforts.
- Lex Loci Labs: Building technology to enable alternatives to imprisonment, such as pre-arrest diversion and drug treatment programs.
- Near Space Labs: Selling access to frequently updated, self-gathered aerial imagery at a resolution of 30 centimeters per pixel, with a higher resolution in development.
- Pigeonly: A mobile-based solution to help people locate and communicate with inmates at a cost the company says is lower than the average prison phone call.
- Qwally: Tools to help vendors navigate local government purchasing, including certification management, outreach and directories.
- Stae: A platform for linking legacy and modern data sources and hooking them up with business intelligence and data publishing tools.
- Waterly: A mobile app to help water utility workers “replace those old clipboards” while gathering information and reporting it to the state.
“Local governments have additional reasons to limit their exposure to what they might see as risky startups,” said CivStart CEO Anthony Jamison in a statement. “CivStart helps to lower the risk for governments in adopting these solutions, while providing our startups with comprehensive support in navigating the challenges of working with governments, because our local governments and the communities they serve deserve the best, most affordable, and most innovative solutions to meeting their needs.”
