A Philadelphia startup founded by a former White House staffer that maps geographic population data to help inform policymakers, business leaders and students has raised $3 million to accelerate its growth and up its headcount.
PolicyMap Inc. was founded in 2018 by Maggie McCullough, who has also held roles with the City of Philadelphia, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. It was spun out of the Reinvestment Fund, a Philadelphia-based organization that provides financial and analytical tools to nonprofits.
The $3 million Series A was led by the Reinvestment Fund, which matched the $1.5 million PolicyMap raised from Ben Franklin Technology Partners, Spring Point Partners and individual investors.
With the funding, in 2024 McCullough plans to add seven new roles to an existing team of 26, primarily in data science and technology roles.
In addition to its headquarters in Center City, PolicyMap also has an office in Los Angeles.
PolicyMap, which serves nonprofits like health systems and universities, including most of the major institutions in the Philadelphia area, has seen steady growth since its inception, seeing more than double-digit revenue growth year over year each year since 2019, McCullough said.
The idea for what would become PolicyMap came about when McCullough was working at the Reinvestment Fund in 2008. Through her work, she saw the need from nonprofits for deeper information about the neighborhoods they were serving. That included where there are food desserts, a dearth of affordable housing and other general demographic information. The one-off mapping projects that sprung from these questions began to gather momentum and PolicyMap officially spun out from the Reinvestment Fund as a for-profit entity in 2018.
Since, it has turned into an analytics engine that pulls from hundreds of sources to provide data on 50,000 indicators for over 650 government entities, health care institutions, universities, business and nonprofits. Those indicators provide insights into jobs, income, government incentives, housing and employment.
Currently, the platform is used in classrooms at local institutions like the University of Pennsylvania, Drexel University, LaSalle University and Villanova University, said McCullough, who earned her bachelor's degree from Saint Joseph's University and and master's degree at Penn.
The Reinvestment Fund has been a majority shareholder in the company since its inception and still is, but McCullough said an infusion of outside capital was necessary to scale the business.
"We reached a point where we realized that if we really want to grow this business, we need outside capital," McCullough said. She added that in the down fundraising market, "turning to people that knew us was essential and then having people that knew us and believed in this team and what we can do, having them reach out to their networks and connections, that was really important."
She also said that having early buy-in from Ben Franklin Technology Partners helped attract other investors.
PolicyMap's board consists of big names in Philadelphia's business community. It is chaired by Moody's Analytics Chief Economist Mark Zandi and includes Independence Blue Cross Chief Strategy and Communications Officer Marcy Feldman Rost; Main Line fintech Akuvo founder and CEO Jay Mossman; and longtime University City Science Center General Counsel Saul Behar.
The company also made a significant addition to its C-suite earlier this year, adding Chief Growth Officer Joel Nadelman, who was previously a senior director at S&P Global Market Intelligence.
Looking ahead, McCullough wants to be "aggressive" about growth in 2024. She sees opportunity for expansion through licensing the data the PolicyMap generates for use on other platforms, rather than their traditional model which provides subscriptions to the PolicyMap platform. The company will also look at adding new data indicators to its repertoire in the first quarter, like information on climate and economic justice, as well as adding more data around maternal health.
