Founders: Austin Boral, Joshua Seiden & Madeleine Smith
Founding: 2022
Mission: To power a more effective and integrated government
Employees: 14 & ~20% Local
Workplace: Hybrid
Stage & Capital Raised: Seed & $5M raised
Investors: General Catalyst
Key Customers: Arizona, New Jersey, Oregon
Glassdoor Rating: N/A
Valuation (estimated): <$50M (assuming average equity dilution in the $5M Seed fundraise)
^ this is a useless number from MGMT Boston. There is no tangible valuation until the business is sold or goes public. Don’t forget it!
Civic Roundtable is building a collaboration engine for government, helping make the public sector more integrated and effective. This seed stage team is building the Google for government – a modern operating system that helps public sector teams work smarter, faster, and more efficiently across agencies to get things done.
Madeleine Smith & Joshua Seiden were colleagues and jet setters. They traveled from sea to shining sea helping law enforcement agencies improve operational efficiency and response capabilities as employees of Mark43. They saw government agencies struggle to communicate across departments, let alone state lines. Through phone calls, email threads, and outdated legacy systems government workers struggled to access information.
Madeleine headed off to Harvard Business School where she met classmate Austin Boral. They bonded over a shared passion for public service and, over dinner at the finest Mexican institution in the Greater Boston area – Felipe’s – hatched a plan to solve the problem of government communication once and for all. It could have been Cirque du Soleil for the government, Austin was all in!
Local government spending is $1T+ (src) and there are more than 90,000 government agencies & entities employing 22.5M+ people (src). Ok, let’s be real these numbers are in flux in the era of DOGE but you get the point. There are a ton of people, resources, and complexity when it comes to federal, state, and local government coordination.
Our government is running on 1980s technology, endless paper forms, and monstrous custom-build projects that take years and millions of dollars to deploy. Why? There’s no single place to quickly ask “who should I talk to about veteran homelessness in my county?” or “what grants are available for parks & recreation right now?” Government workers on the front lines need more modern, flexible, and easier tools to use. “Who’s working on attracting technology companies to Massachusetts and keeping talent here?” Wouldn’t we like to know!
Austin, Josh & Madeleine would meet up in 2022, in a half empty co-working space in Hartford between NYC & Boston, to whiteboard their MVP. They set out to build a platform designed to bring enterprise-grade workflow, data search, and knowledge-sharing tools to the public sector without the multi-year deployment cycles of traditional government software.
Think of Civic Roundtable as an enterprise software platform that consolidates institutional knowledge, like a secure ‘Google’ for government entities, unlocking otherwise siloed information. On the frontline, this translates into less time stumbling around trying to find information and more time delivering value to American taxpayers. Agencies at the federal, state, and local level use Civic Roundtable to gather real-time data for better reporting, tracking, and transparency.
How does it work in practice?
The state of Arizona is confronting extreme heat and appointed a “Heat Czar” to orchestrate everything from shipping-container cooling centers to emergency partnerships with local businesses. Over 5,000 stakeholders rely on Civic Roundtable to track supply availability, share policy updates, and deliver resources to vulnerable groups as temperatures soar.
The state of New Jersey is on a five-year mission to end veteran homelessness. Thousands of people – from the state’s homelessness prevention unit to housing authorities – log into Civic Roundtable daily to see exactly who is doing what, where the resources are, and how to coordinate in real-time.
Civic Roundtable is helping solve meaty problems with technology. Their integration (API) network continues to expand, pulling data from countless third-party tools, so government workers can search across every file, old website, and random folder with a single query. Civic Roundtable is also building better analytics, visualizing “who’s working with who” across agencies, creating a real-time org chart of cross-department relationships and competencies.
They even help agency workers draft policy documents with sources pre-cited and auto-redaction capabilities. AI driven tools allow their customers to automate simple workflows and save people a ton of time.
In 2024 Civic Roundtable raised a $5M Seed round led by General Catalyst and established their initial customer base. The team more than tripled their customer count, currently serve 600+ cities and counties, have multiple seven figure contracts, and touch a population of 70M+ people nationwide.
In 2025 they are eager to see what scale can look like. The team will be looking to grow their GTM team beyond Founder led sales, add to their engineering team, and bring on a Chief-of-Staff type resource. They were recently named one of Fast Company’s 2025 Most Innovative Companies and their NPS has jumped more than 15 points in 6 months. For any civic minded builders, they are always open to connecting with mission-driven folks looking to help modernize government technology here in Boston (and beyond)!
Operators to Know:
- Emily Benz, Deployments
- Alden Quimby, Head of Engineering
- Sanjana Rao, Senior Software Engineer
- Alex Stein, Head of Product
My investigative powers continue to need work so apologies to the Civic Roundtable team I know I missed some up & coming operators internally
Key Roles To Be Hired:
- More roles coming in the months ahead!
If I were interviewing here are some questions I’d ask:
- What are the critical company milestones for 2025?
- What are the biggest challenges as you scale the team past 15 employees?
- What is the long term vision for the company?
- What are the most important roles you’ll be looking to add in 2025 // functional areas that need the most help?
We’re optimizing for readability here so to learn more about Civic Roundtable you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team bring more government agencies into the age of AI. All citizens applaud your efforts. See you around town!
Co-Founder & CEO Madeleine Smith previously featured on The Lantern (Fall 2024):