Unpacking the Latest Market Moves

All right, uh, welcome back to an earlier edition of In Case You Missed It. Uh, we're missing Jed this week, but he'll be back with us next Friday. But Joe and I were talking about just all of the activity that had hit the GovTech market this week, and we wanted to make sure that we provided a little commentary about what's been going on. There is no shortage of press releases and articles that have been happening. Joe, what do you think about all the, the news this week?

Well, we were texting this morning. What a crazy week, right? You expect some activity always, but not the level that we saw in the space that we saw.

Absolutely. So let's just dive right in. So the first kind of piece of news that we saw earlier in this week was around ArchiveSocial merging with a website compliance startup called Monsito. Now, this was really an interesting move because previously it was announced that ArchiveSocial had acquired NextRequest, which kind of dealt with freedom of information requests and building kind of a modern approach to that. ArchiveSocial has its roots in kind of managing the historical social media archives for agencies and kind of keeping up with compliance there. this now brings in a new international player that has a presence in the US as well as other countries to really focus on this compliance and kind of web powerhouse. Joe, what do you, what do you think about, about this move?

Yeah, it's interesting, right? You— we've talked at length about the value of social media archival through, so through what ArchiveSocial is doing, but obviously the importance of compliance as well. And you're seeing this aggregation of the citizen aspects of it, but now also all the social media and public records under one One umbrella, pretty neat.

Yeah, and I think the other thing that stood out to me here is that, you know, GovTech's global. I mean, there's no shortage of that. There's a ton of activity happening in the UK and New Zealand and various parts of the world in Latin America. And, you know, we're now starting to see more and more companies that are looking at the US GovTech market as an expansion area. In this case, you know, coming in and creating a powerhouse under kind of one company. So exciting, exciting times to kind of see what's going to happen here. But that wasn't all, you know, that was big news enough. But then we saw Granicus, which, you know, has really been on an acquisition spree of a variety of companies from, you know, Open Cities, Bang the Table. Now we've got GovQA in the mix. And this was another, you know, really focus on kind of those basic requests that come into agencies and managing the complexities of that. You know, this is just showing just kind of the importance of that layer of government. And again, another Another capability on the platform that Granicus has been assembling over the past few years, you know, starting first with the GovDelivery-Granicus merger and then all of the different moves from Firmstep to the other acquisitions that have happened. Joe, what, what caught your eye on this one?

Well, a couple things. One is I think you're seeing this activity in this space based on our research, a lot of focus going into obviously the automation of these backend processes that government has, but also where they interface with residents. So we are seeing the license permitting inspections market, all those citizen touch, touch points being ripe targets for automation. So this is some noteworthy activity in a space that's going to be very active.

Absolutely. And then the last request, the last thing that kind of came through was actually just a few hours ago we saw this and we're texting about it this morning. Civic Plus announced that they are acquiring Unicode. And so a big move for both companies here. Uh, MuniCode has its roots kind of set in legal codification services, and they grew over the past few years into really creating a platform with a variety of digital services at the core. And Civic+ has kind of been at the helm of all of the content management space. A lot of companies that are playing in that space like Proud City and Revise and others— eGranicus has a play here too— but this now joins kind of this record layer, you know, really focusing on the legal code, all of the services associated with that, as well as all of these other elements that Municode has been able to center and kind of joins forces with the new Civic+ experience play that they have with the Civic platform. Joe, what do you think about this one?

Well, Civic+ is quickly becoming a powerhouse, right? We've seen them be active with SeeClickFix, obviously now into Municode, which has been a longstanding brand in the GovTech space. But you mentioned it, the codification piece is unique, but also the agenda meeting and management. aspect.

Yep.

It's been a big play for governments throughout the pandemic. We obviously now see where we are with the Delta variant and the fact that governments' plans aren't changing. We're still going down a path of this online engagement, digital meetings, digital signatures, records. So for me, looking at all 3 of these as a whole, you've got a strong tie-in across the importance of automation and the importance of records and being close to that system of record at the local government marketplace.

Yeah, I think you're exactly right. The system of record's where it's at, and historically we've seen, you know, when we track the GovTech 100, a lot of the acquisitions that happen on that list every year kind of fall into the finance and administration bucket, things that are kind of at that record layer. A lot of the activity this year has been across the board, but that record component, owning and kind of being able to tie and connect the dots with that record and other services, seems to be the sweet spot. I mean, you think about, you know, the website is a front door for a lot of agencies, so we've seen a lot of legacy technology and a lot of platform companies move into that front-end side of government. And then we've seen the reverse migration too, right, where you have these front-end capabilities that are partnering with the big back-end platforms and doing interesting work there. But again, the record and the system of record level seems to be where there's so much activity, so much M&A, so much fundraising happening right now. So what a wild week it was, and who knows what's going to happen next week, Joe.

Yeah, I think it's interesting as we, we've talked, as government comes out of hopefully the worst of this pandemic, what they've deployed. We talk often about how they're heading into this great reconciliation period. Now they're going to be coming into that reconciliation period where you've got movements like these from Civic+ and others where they're building these comprehensive portfolios where you can come in and make that platform procurement, if you will, and stick with that and get a lot more than you did maybe 15, 18 months ago.

Yeah, absolutely. The platform play is back. The return of the platforms is here. And I think agencies, you know, we're looking at a variety of new approaches to how they navigate this environment that's there. So we're gonna be talking a lot more about that platform play over the coming weeks and interviewing some of the people behind it. But we wanted to give you kind of a quick update on some of the major market moves that have happened this week in the world of GovTech.

Well, yeah, this is a crazy week that was. We look forward to joining you next week and we'll see you in September. Have a wonderful weekend.

Sounds great. Thanks, Joe.