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

All right, TGIF! It's Friday and it is now officially December, our last month of the year. So welcome back for another episode of In case you missed it, Dustin Haisler joined by Joe. Hey, Joe, nice jacket there.

Thank you. And hey, we're on the episode together.

That's right, that's right, we're starting the episode together today. So, uh, what a wild, uh, year it has been. Can't wait to recap it for you in future episodes. But today we've got a great episode because we're featuring our part 2 of our State of GovTech Showcase winners. And these are the startups that pitched at our State of GovTech event that was done in partnership with CivStart a few months ago. These are the kind of the cream of the crop, the startups that really exemplified what it meant to be a GovTech company, and we have representatives from Reaply and ThroughGreen and potentially Collective Liberty today that are here to break down what they do, how they work in the market, and how you can leverage their capabilities in your own jurisdiction. So first up, we'll invite Gar Punit, the Chief Impact Officer for Reaply. Gar, thanks so much for joining us. I'd love for you to break down Reaply and how you work in the market today.

Absolutely. First of all, love the production quality here. We do so many of these and this is excellent. So this is already enjoyable, but great to be here. Well, Reaply in a nutshell. So for us, we've got 2 focuses. So one is we're all about internal reuse at large organizations. So that can typically be thought of as enterprise, but also we've got our government solutions as well. Both whenever it comes to large organizations, there's no shortage on the government or enterprise side of increasing utilization of assets like tables, desks, chairs, even building materials when you're thinking about remodeling spaces. And so we see that across the board, across the industry, large organizations can increase reuse, which ultimately decreases procurement costs. And again decreases the waste that most of these large companies, large organizations send to landfill. And then the secondary product that we've got, which is our probably our newest product, is we're now going and launching in cities and focusing on building materials. And so that's actually largely focused on construction surplus and deconstructed materials in a constituency/community near you. And so we're going to be doing a lot of that, pushing a lot of new marketplaces, circular city marketplaces in the next year. So that's going to be 2023, with then even more cities coming in 2024. And we look forward to having more of those conversations.

Awesome. Hey, Garth, thanks so much. And if you want to take a seat in our virtual green room, we'll see you back at the end of the show.

Excellent.

All right. Thank you very much. All right. Without any further delay, I want to welcome to the show Alex. Alex is going to tell us a little bit about ThruGreen. So Alex, the floor is yours.

Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Hey, I'm Alex. I'm one of the founders at ThruGreen. We are a startup that makes traffic lights smart. So most people in this country think that traffic lights are a lot more smarter than they are, and unfortunately they're not. So most of the traffic lights in this country aren't even online. So our system is built to help us Put traffic lights online and give us the ability to make them talk to each other and improve traffic flows. So we have a couple different products and services that we deliver at a super high level. We sell things like making traffic lights more intelligent in the sense that we make the traffic lights talk to each other so we can improve the traffic flows and reduce carbon emissions. We could say, oh, there's 4 cars coming down the street, maybe you should hold the light a little bit longer. We do things like that to make the traffic lights, you know, maybe not be 30 seconds in one direction, maybe a little bit longer to make the flows better and the carbon emissions a little bit lower. We do things like that. We also do pretty critical things like we get firefighters and ambulances and police and EMS to emergency events faster or get people to hospitals faster because we have the ability to change the traffic light using vehicle location information. So, you know, a GPS tracker from a vehicle or mobile applications, or there's API feeds or cellular routers that are on government vehicles. We take that location information and we tell the traffic light a vehicle is coming ahead of time, and our software lets us change the light in advance of its arrival so folks can get where they have to go safer and faster. And then finally, for— and this is very traffic-specific, but I hinted most people think the traffic lights are a lot smarter than they are. So if you're ever driving around and you see the light is flashing red, most of the time the government doesn't know that that's broken. So they're kind of reliant upon us as citizens to call that in and say, hey, you know, could you take a look at this intersection? Because we're putting the traffic lights online, our technology allows us to tell maintenance folks that, hey, you know, you may want to take a look at this intersection. There's something that's broken. We give the cities the ability to do some of the maintenance work remotely, to change a setting or see what's going on. So we let them know what's up. And with that, we help, you know, move things around faster and get people going where they need to go faster. So thank you so much for having us.

All right. Well, thanks for hopping on. We're going to bring you both back in now and have some Q&A with you. I mean, I think what's really interesting about you both is, you know, you work with a market. I mean, I think back to, you know, my startup days and was told to avoid 2 markets, education and government. And you're, you know, you're focused on these regulated markets and also tackling really complex challenges, which, you know, hats off to you both for that. So what, if anything, has surprised you when it comes to working with state and local government? Gar, let's start with you for this one.

You know, automatically, if they're—

how do I say this?

Governments come with sort of hat in hand. They come with humility of saying, we know we're not enterprise, we haven't all figured this out. And I often go back to them and be like, well, in our case, you all are actually ahead of the curve. And so many times you all are trying to think of policies. There's governments that are trying to think of how to reuse, build sustainability within their policies and different frameworks within the organization. And I get to go back and be like, hey, you're ahead of the curve on this one. Let's continue to work together. And that's where there's almost an equality in sustainability where we're all not doing enough, that we can actually increase the amount of work that we're doing. And so that's really been my biggest learning is actually how can we just reset the whole conversation? There's no shame involved with coming and saying, hey, we're trying to think of this doing better. That's the whole point. And ultimately then we do get to get into the weeds of RFPs and thinking about funding and all of that, but that's later. It could really just be down to actually let's think about the problem. Let's think about how we can create these solutions. And ultimately, we're always innovating around even our own pricing, which is we've really frankly started to look at not how do we think of governments as the client, but really how do we think of governments as our partners and try to actually increase those policies, increase the work that we can do in these communities.

Yeah, I love that. I appreciate that. Alex, how about you? You know, any surprises? I mean, you're working on some really complex challenges related to IoT, and, you know, many agencies may not even fully understand how their intersections work. So I would love to kind of get your perspective on this.

Yeah, absolutely. So I think actually building upon sort of the last answer there, the government is a lot more forward-thinking than people give it credit to. And I think a lot of our features and functionality are built and driven by requests from the customer. And just to give an example, right, our software gives us the ability to give certain types of vehicles different levels of priority at intersections. But we're seeing scenarios now where the government is actually coming up with use cases that I hadn't even thought of, or, you know, okay, Well, if I have a bus coming this way and an ambulance coming this way and a train, but the traffic light's not crowded and the bus actually has no passengers on it, who gets the decision? And it's not up for us to decide, but the governments, they're thinking about things from a utilitarian perspective as well, but a lot more complex rules of traffic flow and management than I thought of. And it's very exciting that they're using our software to kind of unlock the ability to manage and control the intersections a lot more granular. It's not just a light switch anymore, which is the way traffic works. But it's— we're giving their ideas a mechanism to implement, you know, implement their ideas on the road, which is very exciting for us.

Or the dad that's late to school pickup, which I often find myself in that boat.

But yeah, you know what's to be prioritized.

So yeah, yeah.

Oh, I'm sure school drop-off is a big problem in a lot of areas in which there's congestion on those roads. I'm sure that's actually a real issue. With stoplights.

It is, yeah.

And governments have actually brought ideas to us where we'll be doing some work where, you know, if there's a school bus, you know, it's common. Okay, yeah, you're gonna give a school bus a green light, but now that we have the ability to control the intersections, we're able to do things like, well, what if I would stop the traffic at intersections around where a school bus is dropping somebody off to increase safety? And those were actually ideas that came from our customers, right? So I give the government a lot of credit for the folks, for the ideas that they have, and we're happy to help them implement these things.

Cool. Alex, I'm gonna stick with you for a second. You know, as a startup, what advice would you have for our government audience in terms of engaging more startups or working with organizations like yourselves in the future?

I would— in terms of, well, I guess I don't have— I'm not really necessarily advice. It's more of like a statement of gratitude that I thought it was going to be a lot harder to work with the local governments than I thought it was. You know, it was like, you know, the old days of, oh, you know, no one got in trouble for buying IBM. There's certain companies in the traffic space that are sort of established players, but there's a lot more openness to try out new technologies than I expected. And for people that haven't thought about working with a smaller company, I would, you know, because it's software, I would recommend, you know, not just my company but others. I would give these folks a chance and let them try and prove what you can do, and you'll see pretty quickly that the startups can compete very well with sort of the established players in the space.

I think, Gar?

I mean, I can't argue with that. Yeah, this is— I understand to some degree there's amount of risk management involved in trying to figure out procurement practices and trying to sort of wade through who can actually provide that service. On our end, we're always trying to prove that, hey, we think about things a little bit differently than the status quo players. And in our world, it's all about furniture, property management, the materials that make up the built environment within our government clients. And ultimately, we're all about rethinking. And so we can start conversations with just rethinking about the future that they're looking for. And so just engage in that fun design process. That's not often something that people get to engage in. Think about the future that you wanna build. And we're likely almost probably there in some degrees with our enterprise clients, some degrees with our government clients, but we can come together to kind of again curate that future vision. On our end then it just comes down to what can we do today? What can we do in the next year? And then what can we do in 5 years? And building incrementally is very helpful for us, especially in this industry where there's lots of procurement decisions. Everyone's always looking at buying something. But we need to build that vision. This can't just happen in almost singular large RFPs. That can sometimes be prohibitive to change because then you're expecting huge sweeping changes that everyone can be resistant to, and some parties, some others not, some departments. And we could just build this more incrementally and really build this over time.

Yeah, I love that. I think, you know, that reimagining of what's possible and really, you know, not just focusing on the today and what's tactical, but the future dynamic that you talked about is such an exciting time. And I mean, I think, you know, being in public service today, this is incredible because the textbooks of the past are being rewritten by everybody that's in government right now.

Yes.

And, you know, there's no playbook for the now. And so I think, you know, what you're both working on in your respective companies is a great example of, you know, something we're going to talk about down the road. So let's talk about who those ideal customers and clients might be. So, Gar, as you think about you know, kind of the applicability of what you do, what are the right types of agencies or partners for you?

Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, this kind of segues actually from the last question, which is we try not to annoyingly ask the question too much of why. Why is this system built like this? Why is this process like this? Why are you getting rid of furniture when you're actually procuring the same thing over again over in a different department? And by asking those questions, we, you know, we tend to get to this material flow understanding within, frankly, some sort of government. What we've honed in on is city governments are really probably the people that we want to support and encourage. We think that from a last-mile perspective, there's a lot of work that we need to do to actually engage in the transfer of materials and value across these communities. It just so happens in a lot of ways, cities are where a lot of these materials in value resides. They're sort of locked up in that 25 to 50-mile radius around these large urban environments. And if we can master that, if we can really figure out how those materials flow, then we can start to emanate through different counties and different states. And those can be sometimes, you know, funded in different measures too. Like we could have a— we have a state that's funded other city initiatives. And so that's— that can be possible because overall it serves different constituencies. But ultimately, that's where we're really trying to focus, is focusing on cities where we can really figure out those material flows, figure out almost those material identities in those cities, and then work outward from there.

Yeah, I love that.

Alex, how about you?

Yeah, absolutely. So our software is kind of broken into modules or service offerings for a couple different types of government buyers. So I guess the first would be, you know, fire, police, or EMS. Would you like faster response times to an event or to get somebody to the hospital? If you have an open mind and you're willing to try out a new technology, I think we're a very good product for you because we deploy very quickly and we can guarantee green lights to customers. So I think there's a powerful message for folks in that perspective. Another buyer of ours is transportation organizations that wanna move their buses along more effectively and efficiently, the same way we give the buses priority at intersections and can keep them on time and on schedule. And then finally, folks that are in the traffic space themselves, whether you need to put a traffic light online, you need to manage it remotely, you want to change the schedules or the operations of the intersection, and you want to just make life a little bit better for your constituents by reducing congestion and reducing carbon emissions. Those are sort of some of the buyers that we would love to speak with and demonstrate our technology.

Well, that's awesome. Alex, Gar, thank you both for joining us on this week's episode of In Case You Missed It, and more importantly, the work that you all do to make our communities just a little bit better. Until then, have a wonderful weekend and thanks for joining us.

Thank you.