State of GovTech 2022 Startup Showcase Winners (1 of 2)

Happy Friday, everyone. This is Joe Morris here, and we'll have Dustin Haisler with us here in a moment. We've got a little bit of a different episode coming at you with this, uh, episode of In Case You Missed It, because earlier this month, eRepublic partnered with CivStart and AWS to hold the State of the GovTech 2022 event live in Arlington, Virginia. It was a great opportunity to network with leaders through a mix of keynotes, panels, and one of the highlights was the Startup Showcase, where 24 GovTech startup companies took the stage to pitch their solutions to a panel of judges. 6 of those companies were recognized as winners for embodying innovative uses of technology to solve public sector challenges, and we're excited to have a few of them with us today to introduce their companies and their solutions to our audience. So without any further delays, I want to bring up Elizabeth Turner with Electro Analytics, And Elizabeth, thanks for joining us, and the floor is yours.

Thank you, Joe. Great to be here. Hello everyone watching online. My name is Elizabeth Turner, and I'm here to represent Electo Analytics. Um, to kick us off, I'd like to introduce you guys to Sam. Sam is a member of a team at a startup that does innovative work in the clean water space. However, she lacks the tools and access to data that would make her work more efficient and help her stay organized. Sam's team faces the same challenge many organizations do. The solution is a platform where teams of any size can use advanced tools to engage with stakeholders and influence government affairs. Meet Electo Analytics. We've built that solution. Electo Analytics is a scalable public affairs software designed to empower teams of all sizes. So basically, with Electo, clients like Sam can map, track, and influence policy all in a collaborative and organized workspace. With Electo, Sam and her team of 7 can build relationships with key policymakers and agency officials involved in the water and energy space using Electo's expansive federal, state, and local directories. They can share personalized notes and manage task flow for relationship building. They also have access to tracking legislation at the federal and state levels, as well as federal regulation. They can also utilize AI-powered policy monitors to receive the latest updates in real time, generating results that keep her team one step ahead. Prior to using Electo, conducting manual research on legislative tracking and stakeholder engagement would take Sam's team hundreds of hours per month, setting their agenda back. With our platform, Sam's team works 30 times faster. That's right, 30 times faster. So rather than visiting thousands of web pages to scrounge for information, some of which is only available in hard copy format, they can search for and organize it all in one spot. Electo is designed to empower ordinary policy teams and advocacy groups to carry out professional lobbying, which democratizes a $400 billion industry has an incredible growth rate of 15%. Um, so we essentially have 6 key features as well as live updates that teams receive when they set up monitors. Our 6 key features will be policy tracking, so that will be legislative tracking in all 50 states and Congress and federal regulatory tracking. They'll also have access to our federal, state, and local directories to help expand their sphere of influence nationwide, and our uniquely extensive local directory which has over 150,000 entries and 98% of towns in the US with a population of 1,000 or more. I think that really helps teams, especially as we're trying to connect across, across different municipalities. We also track think tank content and their events so you can discover new insights from expert analysis, policy briefs, and commentaries on major policy areas from leading think tanks. And then we also have collaborative and intuitive project management tools that helps unlock potential through a platform that officially connects our data and workflow with integrated project management features. Teams can accelerate progress on their policy priorities. And then 2 pretty new features that we are very excited about are our Electo Analytics Experts and our Electo Analytics Concierge. So with our experts, you can connect with subject matter experts around the globe and gain reliable insights that help better inform your policy and business decisions, all within 24 hours. And then we also have an Electo Analytics Concierge that helps teams connect with different legislative aides that work on specific areas and just kind of helps bring everything together. And then, like I said, our live updates, we have policy alerts that help teams never miss a beat. That is essentially us and our services. Would love to connect with anyone watching to share more. Feel free to contact me at Elizabeth, Elizabeth@electoanalytics.com. Thank you, guys.

All right, well, thanks so much, Elizabeth. That was great. Next, please welcome Andre McGregor from ForceMetrics. Andre, thanks for joining us.

Thank you for having me.

If you could spend a few minutes telling us about yourself, your journey into GovTech, and then a bit more about ForceMetrics.

Absolutely. So Andre McGregor, founder of ForceMetrics. I started ForceMetrics after George Floyd as a way for helping officers and dispatchers and co-responders make better decisions in the moment. especially around community policing. My background, I was an FBI cyber special agent many years in New York and in DC, working cases from counterterrorism to cybercrime and was building software out in Silicon Valley. And then after George Floyd said we needed to do more in this space around data, so started Force Metrics. We're now at 20 software engineers, data scientists, and machine learning engineers whose job is to take data from different systems across the enterprise and make it easy to make a decision on an individual quickly. So our goal is to say, how do you get the right information on a person, group of people, or situation on the first search across multiple systems? No one goes to page 15 of Google. They keep reiterating or keep iterating, especially in a world that's like policing, which seems very mainframe-like. Visually intuitive platform where I can identify quickly the risks and needs of a victim or an offender. Using machine learning labels that identify things from safety with weapons or dog in the house or needs like dementia, autism, PTSD, domestic violence victim, homelessness, along with personalized dashboards that support investigative work as well as community programs, interventions like Narcan, fentanyl, and how those services are being used in the city. And then Everything is on the smartphone. So, you know, every officer has a supercomputer in their pocket that should be used for more than emailing and texting. So we provide that platform for them to be able to access that information. And really the problem that we're solving for is, you know, bits and pieces of a person's life is scattered across multiple systems, CAD dispatch, RMS report systems, jail management system, internet. sort of search engines, TLO clear. And if you had 2 to 3 hours to research a person, you'd figure out everything that you need to know. But you have 2 to 3 minutes before you get out the car to go in the house or walk up to the traffic stop. And you need to be able to get that information quickly. And most important information like mental health calls, officer safety information is written in these reports, but they're often buried. And no one has time to read this. So, you know, we wanted to just sort of think about the problem in a way where we said we need to optimize decision-making in the moment. We need to, you know, bring modern technology to bear because using modern technology on top of existing data within the police department means we don't have to train anybody how to use this. E-commerce has taught our officers and dispatchers how to iterate on a search, what a push notification is, how to pinch a map. And, you know, if we use modern technology, then we don't need to train someone for 2 hours and take them off the road, and we can provide them the insights and the notifications they're looking for. The second part of the application is what we call our digital co-responders, where we said, how do we identify the root causes and social determinants that are happening inside a call? So the assault or the domestic, both are bad and you should not hit another individual. If it's a result of someone who lost their job, childcare, eldercare, LGBTQ needs, veteran needs, and we don't address those root problems, We're going to come back for that assault and domestic again and again and again. So we use our machine learning engineers to extract those social determinants and allow them to be able to connect victims to the social service, nonprofit, faith-based organizations that all want to be helpful on the community policing side, but they don't run a 911 center and they're not taking in 911 calls. So we allow for them to be part of that conversation and really move from crisis to case management, allowing from that. initial 911 connection to the provider follow-up. You know, some of the success stories and really the ROI that we get from the application is not only the crime suppression or the closing cases where it's used to find individuals that are predatory against children or stealing catalytic converters and reducing the time it takes for a victim to become whole. It's also being able to do things like fuzzy name searching. So when you have someone that's calling 911 and you don't know how to spell their name, you know, you don't know exactly how to search for that. In a traditional system, similar to a mainframe, you end up typing the name multiple different ways hoping to get a result. Well, we use fuzzy logic much like Google. So when the name comes close, we give you a suggestion and allows for the dispatchers to to really sort of hone in on that information on top of the fact that our applications are used in ways that we never thought it was gonna be used. So SWAT teams use it for barricaded subjects so that they know, does this person have PTSD or a military background? Therefore, they shouldn't bring out any sort of military-style vehicles and avoid triggering them. You know, we have several departments that we're working with in Colorado, New Jersey, Texas, North Carolina. And really, the journey has been a great journey, but it's been a long journey because if you've never dealt with police technology or police data, it's incomplete, a lot of typos, you know, dirty from a transforming perspective. One of my cities has 50 different ways to spell catalytic converter, including Cadillac converter. So we have to normalize that data. We have to clean that data. We have to make sure we have all the data correct because this is some of the most important data that needs to be analyzed. Our platform is now one that's used by detectives and analysts as much as the patrol officer, dispatcher, chief, and even city manager. Thank you for allowing me to present about Force Metrics.

Awesome. Well, thanks, Andre. That's great. Make sure everyone check out those URLs that we're putting on the bottom of the screen. Rounding out our first group of these 3 startups is Hudson Hollister from HData. Hudson, welcome.

Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. It's an incredible honor. I'm excited to talk to you all about regtech, uh, regulatory technology. The story really begins about 14 years ago in the financial crisis. I was a lawyer at the Securities and Exchange Commission and discovered while I was working to try to simplify corporate regulatory reporting that the reason why we missed Bernie Madoff, it's a data problem. The SEC at that time, and unfortunately still today, was not using data to track all of the entities that it regulates. Instead, the SEC was using documents, PDF documents, reams of them, piles of them, hundreds and thousands of pages of numbers. But the numbers were not their own separate data field. Every table, every row and column in the SEC forms, it was just graphic design. There was no way to pull individual numbers electronically out of those filings. I started a crusade about 15 years ago now to convince government regulatory agencies to transform their regulatory reporting requirements from disconnected PDF documents into searchable and standardized data. Now, it's been gratifying to watch over the past 15 years with the growth of the GovTech industry and the probably the original adoption of the RegTech buzzword, we're seeing regulatory agencies adopt that challenge and transform the different kinds of forms that they collect from whatever they regulate from disconnected documents into open and standardized data. I'm Hudson Hollister. I'm the CEO and founder of HData, and we're working in the energy industry to affect that transformation. When regulatory agencies stop using PDF documents and use searchable data instead, that means efficiency for their regulated entities, and it also means for the first time analytics are possible to help the agencies do their jobs. I wanna tell you a story of how this is now happening in the energy industry and how it can be expanded beyond the energy industry to other places. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in 2015 chose to set off on this journey. The FERC decided that it wanted to stop using PDF documents for the annual and quarterly reports that it collects from the energy companies that it regulates. Before 2021, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission collected annual forms from energy companies that looked kind of like this. Do you see the stamps? That is graphic design. That's not data. The FERC was using Microsoft Visual FoxPro to collect filings from the types of companies that they regulate. And once the companies had manually typed the numbers into the fields, the FERC would smash all of that down and publish a PDF document. The only way to get access to the information in those reports from the energy companies was to download the PDFs and read them. However, the FERC made a big transformation in 2021. The FERC adopted an XML structure for the information that it collects. What that means is that every number in all those forms, every number is now its own data field. Every number has an electronic tag that carries within it the information that's necessary about what the number is, what the denomination is, and what time period it relates to. This means that every number in every schedule of every annual and quarterly report that energy companies have to file with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission— every number is now its own data field. As a result, Regulatory reporting for those compliance departments of those energy companies is now efficient. Regulatory intelligence is now ubiquitous. I founded HData to create a platform to make regulatory reporting and regulatory analysis easy for anyone that has to deal with regulatory information. We've deployed in the energy industry so far. But this is adaptable to any complex regulated industry, any place where there are companies that have— that are regulated and have to report to a government agency. In the world of energy reporting, here's how it works. Our HData Compliance solution allows energy companies to easily fill out their forms. HData Explorer allows them to explore every number from every schedule from every form. Create interactive charts and graphs, and see those charts and graphs move whenever the numbers do. The FERC collects all the information now in a structured format, publishes it out that way, and our database listens to it 24/7, every 10 minutes pulling in whatever new forms have been received. HData Library is the easiest way to search and find regulatory reports, and HData Insights is where we connect information from the energy reports with other kinds of regulatory information. For instance, we've created the first mapping of every power plant across the whole country that matches each power plant from the FERC forms to separate information published by the Energy Information Administration, or EIA. When you combine all of these tools, it's one comprehensive way to manage and understand regulatory information. This is a game changer for regulated energy companies. It's also a game changer for regulatory agencies, not just the federal agencies, but the state agencies as well. We're very proud to have begun working with 5 different state-level energy regulatory commissions to help them use this regulatory information to more efficiently oversee the utilities and the pipelines that they regulate. At the same time, the transformation has begun in energy, but it's not going to stop there. Whenever any government regulator adopts a structured digital format for the information that it collects, what it means is that we can put our platform in place. 3 weeks ago, the United States Senate advanced a bill called the Financial Data Transparency Act, which will require all the banking regulators to adopt a similar format for all the information they collect from the banks. I wrote that bill 11 years ago when I was a congressional staffer at the House Oversight Committee. Once we finish with the energy industry, we're coming for the banks. I'm excited to have had the chance to introduce HData. We're very gratified to be featured as part of the State of GovTech 2022. For those that work in GovTech, for those that focus on regulations, for those that love or hate regulatory reports, I'm so excited to introduce the benefits of a full regtech platform to automate the different kinds of work that are involved in regulation. We're eager to work with you. On behalf of HData, thank you so much.

All right, those were amazing overviews, and, you know, first of all, congratulations again on being recognized at State of GovTech. It was great to hear your pitches there, and it was even better to be able to expose those to the wider government technology ecosystem. So now we have a couple questions for you to kind of wrap up our time together today. First question up is, have you had any surprises working with state or local agencies? Any advice for them as they look to work for new companies like your own? Elizabeth, let's start with you on this one.

Yeah, of course. I would say, so number one, we work with a wide range of organizations that span from nonprofits to trade associations to government offices themselves. And obviously each one of them is a different size and has a different size team. Team. And also each one of them has a different area of focus and a way of functioning. So it's not really a surprise that we need to find the best way to support each of these different individual unique organizations. But I think that has been the thing, the ways that we support both their staff and support their policy priorities through our technology. And then advice, I would say there are a lot of innovative companies out there whose mission is to support organizations in becoming more efficient. The advice I would have would be to explore opportunities with these innovative companies just because I think Organizations like Electo Analytics can help, number one, save you a lot of time and save you a lot of money. So always just trying to help people become more efficient.

Fantastic. Andre, how about you? Any surprises along the way? I mean, you know, JPS is a tough vertical. So I know, you know, you lived it, you know, kind of as a practitioner and now you're supporting them through Force Metrics.

Yeah, I would say the surprise is that it's a lot easier to buy a $100,000 armored vehicle than it is to buy a $100,000 piece of software. because you don't need the CIO to sign off on the armored vehicle. But, you know, I think the surprises I've had have been positive. When we deploy the application out into cities that have real problems like juvenile gun violence, substance misuse, domestic violence, you know, homelessness, we're not getting anyone saying that this isn't working. I think what we're getting— the surprise that we're getting is saying, Can you do more? Can you do more? Can you do more? Which is good. It messed up my roadmap, but it's great from a, okay, like, I think the wheels are moving on the fact that data can be a force multiplier, especially in a world where we just don't have the people that want to be cops anymore. Like, it's, you know, every department's hurting to recruit. Every department is understaffed. Seattle is down 36% officers, and they're probably not going to get it back, at least not in the same structure of policing today. It's just a different generation. And so until that culture shift changes, using technology as a force multiplier, I would say from an advice perspective, looking at cities that don't normally get sort of the interest of technology vendors, the Topekas and Wichitas and the Lexington, Kentuckys are as if not more important than the New York, Chicago, and LAs because they're hurting just the same and no one gives them the time of day the same as some of the larger cities. My advice is sometimes the medium-sized cities are better.

We're gonna have to print the easier to buy an armored car than a $100,000 piece of software on a coffee mug. So there's your quotable moment or a quote from today. Hudson, how about you? You know, as you talked about, you know, in your pitch, kind of the regulatory environment, definitely a lot of challenges there. Any surprises or advice for those agencies?

When we first started working in energy regulation, that we would have a lot of difficulty selling to state agencies. And the reason for that is, as you as you like a lot of areas, there's a there's a federal approach. We have the federal regulation and we have state regulation. We've got the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and then we have the state level regulators and the types of forms they collect and the work they do. It rhymes, but it's not identical. You've got a lot of state forms that look a lot like the federal form, and then a couple of them just require the energy company to report the federal one with a. cover letter on top of it, that kind of thing. So we thought it would be a while before we could get in front of the state regulators, not until the state regulators actually transformed all their filings the same way the feds already did. And that takes— it took 7 years for the feds, so who knows how long it would take the states. What we discovered instead was that we had— we can provide some value out of the box already, because the state regulators, even though they've got their own forms, and for the most part those are still stuck in the PDF world, they need to make comparisons across the whole country, and the federal forms are the way they do that. And So we've been able to partner with state government agencies even early days because our platform can be used for comparisons using the federal information as the corpus or as the grist for the mill, even in advance of transforming their state forms. Of course, my advice is the same as I said in the presentation. We would love to see every state-level energy regulator stop using PDFs and use XML structures instead because the Sophistication of the analytics you can apply and the speed with which you can compare your own energy companies with the whole rest of the country, that just gets magnified if you do that. But even before you do that, there's some value to be provided.

So Hudson, I'm going to stick with you. I have a question for everyone. When you look at your ideal customer or ideal agency, what type of agencies are you looking to partner with?

Anybody that needs to use regulatory information and struggles to do so. I always know that we're on the right track when we meet the person who has been maintaining a spreadsheet comparing different regulated companies and trying to manage that spreadsheet, trying to manage regulatory information and typing numbers into it and generating visualizations from it. When I find that person, we know that we're going to be able to provide a lot of value.

Well, there's no shortage of spreadsheets out there. So I think we all know that across many, many government agencies. Andre, how about you?

I think my ideal partner city is just a city that recognizes the progressiveness of data as part of making better decisions. We're getting ready to launch in Aurora, Colorado, and the city manager there sort of has a concept around demand-side management. You know, he has a finite amount of resources that he can send to the 371,000 people that live in Aurora and the additional 500,000 100,000 people that come through it, and he needs to figure out who the repeat users of services are, whether you're a victim or an offender, it's irrelevant. It's expensive to send a million-dollar fire truck for blood pressure. It is expensive to send lots of officers repeatedly to the domestic situation, and we definitely don't want it to be at a violent end of that. And so from his perspective, how do we start to identify and sort of synthesize the needs at the individual or the address level so that we're starting to solve issues before it actually escalates? And so Cities that are thinking that way, cities that are saying, hey, we have to do something else. The ways that we were doing it before, it's just not working, are the best cities for us because we just show that the technology that you've accepted in Amazon, you need to accept that in your workplace. You should not regress 20 years back in time when you go to work, but be okay on your couch, you know, buying stuff.

I love that. So Elizabeth, how about you?

Yeah, I am sort of in the same boat with Hudson here. I think we don't partner with agencies per se, and we don't have a specific focus area for organizations. Anyone that's using a spreadsheet to track legislation, regulation, or anyone that's looking to influence policy or regulation on the local, federal, or state level, I think our product can help make anyone in that category's lives easier.

All right, well, that's all the time we have for today's episode. Just a special thanks to Elizabeth, Andre, and Hudson for joining us and sharing all the great work that you're doing in our market. We're Really excited about each of your companies and glad that the greater government technology audience was able to see that. You'll definitely want to check out each of their solutions. We'll put that in the show notes so that way you can have direct links to their companies and definitely plug in and learn more about them. There's no episode next week due to the Thanksgiving holiday break, but we'll be back December 2nd for part 2 of our Startup Showcase winners from State of GovTech. So we hope you have a great Thanksgiving break and we'll see you December 2nd.

Thanks, Dustin.

Thank you all very much.

Thank you.

Thanks for joining.