Velosimo, based in Salt Lake City, is essentially in the business of making different pieces of software work better together. The company offers a marketplace of pre-built “connectors” between products — think about a payment system working with a permitting portal, or a citizen request entering a work order management system, for example.
It’s not a new idea in the world of technology, but what separates Velosimo is that it focuses specifically on the growing ecosystem of software purpose-built for the public sector — or at least very popular among government agencies.
“MuleSoft, Zapier, Jitterbit … what they’re really missing is they’re missing the endpoints that are in government,” said Kris Trujillo, Velosimo’s founder and CEO. “So when you get MuleSoft, it has a whole bunch of out-of-the box stuff, but stuff like MailChimp, Slack — just not the apps that government uses.”
Rather, Velosimo offers connectors for software products from the likes of Accela, SeamlessDocs, Laserfiche, OpenCounter, Tyler Technologies and others.
In four years, and with $3.2 million raised before the Series A, Velosimo has already built a sizable customer base of more than 70 state and local government customers that runs from the range of 20,000 in population up to the state of California. It’s also struck up partnerships with a variety of tech companies, with several others interested.
The $11 million infusion, led by Macquarie Capital Principal Finance and with participation from Valor Equity Partners, will help the company make the case to gov tech companies it hasn’t partnered with yet that they should come on board, Trujillo said.
“Partnering with Macquarie and partnering with Valor is going to give Granicus, for example, what they’re needing, which is like, ‘Velosimo is a solid player in this space’ — not just Granicus, but CentralSquare, whoever,” he said.
The company’s approach is explicitly no-code, with a dash of low-code. That is to say, the connectors are meant to be handed off to the end users, but Velosimo is increasingly offering ways to help more technical users and contractors build their own connectors as well.
“We make sure that that connector works in ways that it’s meant to for those users of those two systems. That’s built into the connector and it’s managed by the business user, that’s all no-code,” said Ken Sawtelle, the company’s chief revenue officer. “And then our emerging section is the low-code, [where] we provide the building blocks for these partners, not just the [independent software vendors], but also the [system integrators].”
Although tech companies will often sell their products with APIs built in, Velosimo’s pitch is that it eases the burden of every company needing to build connections to every other company. Instead, the company has a natural view into the integrations that are in demand, and focuses entirely on building those connectors in a way that works well.
“Integration is expected at this point,” Trujillo said. “It’s expected, and these companies can’t afford to take the time to do the work — I mean, to do it right and to do it well, where it makes customers happy. Your integration can make or break your deal after the fact, not before, because you can sell them on the vision — it’s when it’s in production, and there’s a 400MB document getting routed that isn’t working, and why isn’t it working?”
Velosimo also offers visibility and tools to help manage those connectors, so if something doesn’t work between two systems it aims to show why and allow the user to try again.
The company’s approach strikes at an ongoing implicit debate in gov tech between wide and narrow — that is, is it better for an agency to have one product that does many things or several products that handle specific tasks and work together?
Cost aside, the latter approach tends to allow for a deeper understanding of user needs within individual products, but requires a lot of integration.
“I come from this [industry] enough to watch these companies try to be the one platform that rules them all,” Trujillo said. “And it sounds like a great story, but it’s not actually what government wants. They want the best technology for that [use case].”
