Curate is changing the way organizations engage with local governments by tapping into municipal meeting data.
The Madison-based civic intelligence company is growing its software platform to help organizations mitigate risk and uncover opportunities—without sitting through hours of meetings or sifting through government documents to glean insight.
Curate combines artificial intelligence and machine learning to filter through millions of municipal documents, such as meeting minutes and agendas. It delivers the data through custom reports sent via email and through its weekly newsletters.
The company’s customers include general contractors, construction firms, utility companies and other organizations seeking early information on infrastructure projects and ordinance changes, such as issues surrounding eminent domain, development moratoriums, plastic bag bans, and rental restrictions, to name a few.
“Our focus is to track the entities that make decisions with taxpayer money,” explains Curate CEO Taralinda Willis. “It isn’t what people consider to be the most exciting. It’s not sexy. But that data can lead [organizations] to something pretty big.”
Willis launched the company with her husband Dale, a software developer, in 2016. As a professional working in large-scale public project management, Willis says she learned firsthand how difficult it can be to keep tabs on a region’s zoning, regulations and legislative developments.
It’s easy to manage Google Alerts, agendas and network relationships in one city, Willis says, but that sort of work presents a sizable business challenge when conducting research across multiple municipalities. Though Willis never set out to be an entrepreneur, she says she couldn’t ignore the opportunity to help organizations find a better way to mine municipal activity.
“Based on my experience in the construction field, I was intimately aware of how all of this works,” she says. “I was taking calls from vendors who were very late in the process. Part of the fun is being able to make sense of [civic data] and being able to share it.”
Combined with the couple’s passion for servant leadership, the founders entered the gener8tor accelerator program to set the early-stage venture in motion. Since launching the company, Curate has continued gaining ground with three successful rounds of funding, totaling more than $2.2 million. Earlier this week, the company also won Wisconsin Inno's 2020 Tech Madness competition, a March Madness-like challenge that includes 32 startups from around the state.
So far, Curate's biggest challenge has been managing how each municipality shares its developments, Willis says.
"We are very much ‘in the weeds’ people."
“Every community is different, and each of those communities uses slightly different language, posting schedules, and documentation,” she says. “We use artificial intelligence to identify what is relevant [and] typically keep less than 1 percent of that data as actionable insights. We are very much ‘in the weeds’ people.”
Today, the Curate civic intelligence platform tracks more than 10,000 municipalities across the state of Wisconsin and is already looking into building data in nearby states. Its software reads more than 3,000 documents per hour, according to its website. Even with the recent pandemic, Willis says municipalities remain on the frontlines of change and the company has adapted its model to tracking regulations related to COVID-19.
With its team of 20 employees—including nearly half who are women, Willis adds—Curate is squarely looking toward the future.
“We want to continue building out our platform,” says Willis. “The biggest opportunities in civic intelligence are still ahead.”
