Govlaunch, CivStart Partner to Bring New Players to Gov Tech

Source: Gov Tech Published: June 18, 2020

An informational resource for government and a civic-tech startup accelerator are now working together to connect public agencies with new technologies.

CivStart, the startup accelerator which launched in July 2019, announced its partnership with Govlaunch, the free, private “innovation wiki” for local governments and businesses, to share details of their tech projects, in a news release earlier this month. The announcement said Govlaunch’s platform will automatically include pages for the startups participating in CivStart’s program and give them a “disruptor” designation, reserved for companies that “disrupt the status quo and fundamentally change the way local governments operate.”

Govlaunch co-founder and CEO James Alfano told Government Technology that he approached CivStart because he saw overlap with his own company’s mission statement: making the gov tech market more accessible to new players and connecting new ideas with governments that need them, despite challenges to procurement and a lack of investment that have historically made tech companies wary of public-sector business. And they’re both interested in diversity.

“We want to bring more diversity to the marketplace, both from the standpoint of bringing in supporting folks who haven’t always been involved in public service or selling to governments, but also increasing the number of sustainable companies led by underrepresented groups,” Alfano said. “We’re featuring all of those companies [participating in CivStart], doing feature pieces, podcasts on some of them. We’re making it easier for our local government community to find them, we’re providing tools for them to share their impacts on existing government partners, and we’re working on new ways within the platform to highlight these folks.”