The Govtech Fund is the first ever venture capital fund launched with the express purpose of investing in civic technology and it launched today with $23 million. The fund has already invested in a handful of civic startups including SmartProcure, MindMixer, SeamlessDocs, and AmigoCloud.
The fund is managed by Ron Bouganim who was previously an angel investor in companies including ShareThrough, HelloSign, PagerDuty, and Close.io. Tim O’Reilly, the founder of O’Reilly Media is also serving as an advisory board member.
Historically, governments have worked with large multinational vendors and contractors in the $450 billion global government IT market. However, over the past few years budget constraints, government adoption of cloud computing, the rise of open data, and significantly reduced sales cycles have created an environment for innovative and cost-effective technology startups to emerge.
CivSource previously reported on the fund’s $17 million investment in MindMixer which provides technology for virtual town hall meetings. AmigoCloud provides GIS technology, SeamlessDocs provides a paperless enterprise environment for government, and SmartProcure is a government procurement intelligence platform.
The fund is based in San Francisco, although potential portfolio companies from across the US will be considered. The initial four investments are located in San Francisco, New York, Kansas City and Deerfield Beach, Florida.
“We’re proud to support a new generation of venture-backable technology startups that have emerged in the past few years — helping governments become more efficient, more responsive and better able to serve society. This is just the beginning of a decades long wave of innovation in government,” said Ron Bouganim, Founder and Managing Partner in a statement.