GovDelivery Acquires NuCivic

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Government email delivery company GovDelivery has acquired NuCivic, a civic startup that provides open source cloud services. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. GovDelivery said in a statement that it plans to use the acquisition to expand its services to government. NuCivic’s product offering is powered by Drupal’s open source content management system.

NuCivic will maintain its brand and leadership moving forward as part of GovDelivery. The NuCivic team will continue to grow working under the leadership of NuCivic’s co-founders, Andrew Hoppin and Sheldon Rampton.

“Joining forces allows us to support the tidal wave of demand in government for open source applications ” Andrew Hoppin, CEO and co-founder of NuCivic, said.

The acquisition comes at a time of significant growth and evolution within civic technology. CivSource has recently reported on the variety of ideas civic startups have for how the future of civic technology will play out. However, the underlying theme for most of these ideas is the growth of platform style offerings. Those platforms are coming together through acquisitions as well as organically, with some companies providing an expansive feature set on their own.

GovDelivery already has client relationships with all levels of government and government in all 50 states. Most of those relationships are focused on email delivery and driving traffic to websites, while bringing on NuCivic will allow for an expansion of those services into other applications. Earlier this year, NuCivic launched its NuData open data platform for government. At that time, NuCivic partnered with Acquia and Carahsoft to launch NuData Enterprise, the first fully open source software-as-a-service (SaaS) open data management solution. Based on Drupal, NuData allows governments to comply with open data mandates and help developers build businesses based on government data.

Early NuData customers and collaborators on the underlying open source project (DKAN) include several federal agencies in the U.S., cities in Germany (Cologne and Bonn), and civic organizations worldwide (Open Puerto Rico, OpenOakland, DataNinja). With the acquisition, this platform could be integrated with GovDelivery to provide an enterprise grade SaaS solution for government.