Rewiring Government

GovTech funding and the path to $100MM ARR.

One potential mark of startup success is funding—namely, progressively-larger rounds of funding. Government Technology Magazine dug into the funding history for companies on their GovTech Top 100 list to find out just how much funding these companies were commanding in each round, along with the increase in capital from round to round. (GovTech funding may be gaining momentum, too. Govtech Fund recently invested in seven more companies, more than doubling their portfolio.)

Of course, healthy revenue is the other big marker of success. Nick Bowden is back with a teardown of the path to $100MM ARR. Aside from the usual suspects (access to cash and market size), he discusses how the founders’ competencies, the product’s value-add, and the team’s makeup can all affect adoption and, ultimately, the company’s bottom line.

Federal IT: Two steps forward, one step back…

Amazon is working on a new GovCloud region, set to open in 2018. The AWS GovCloud (US-East) Region will be a bit closer to target customers in the federal government (although isolated from U.S. East AWS), safeguard against data loss from potential disasters in the Pacific Northwest, and comply with all of the same compliance standards as the existing region.

Last week, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee released the latest Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act (FITARA) Scorecard. Even though agencies’ progress seems to have slowed across the board, USAID walked away with the first A grade ever awarded. You can view the scorecard itself here, courtesy of FedScoop.

What the heck is a blockchain?!

The a16z podcast takes Capitol Hill to chat with Representatives Jared Polis (D-Colorado) and David Schweikert (R-Arizona) about possible applications for blockchain technologies, way beyond cryptocurrencies. The 20-minute episode will leave you with plenty of cocktail party worthy soundbites about everything from information privacy to more effective foreign aid.

Invasion of the chatbots. (Coming to a city near you.)

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services just added a chatbot to their support team. The bot, named Emma, should be able to answer most visitors’ questions, but if she gets stumped, she’ll switch you over to a live representative. In addition to streamlining customer support, the bot also knows how to handle personally identifiable information (PII) with kid-gloves; chat logs are purged after the session ends, or, if you’re transferred to a representative, the bot will scrub PII from the conversation before handing everything over.

Keeping up with industry news can be overwhelming, so DOBT’s weekly Link Roundup aims to be a one-stop shop for GovTech (and GovTech-adjacent) news.

In this first installment: Local governments and the companies that serve them; lots of GovTech funding; and trivia from the history of technology in the White House.