Few early-stage startups in the Twin Cities outside the health care field have experienced the national growth that Civic Eagle has seen over the last few years.
Founded in 2015, Civic Eagle aims to use technology to improve transparency in public policy and legislative affairs. Originally, the company was creating a mobile app to help people understand politics.
But in 2018, Civic Eagle pivoted and began creating Enview, a legislative tracker and policy management tool that enables its users to search for state legislation across the country and to manage communication with their teams and stakeholders.
Minne Inno reached out to CEO Damola Ogundipe to learn about the company's growth plans and how it is navigating the election year.
Minne Inno: Civic Eagle was the very first company Minne Inno profiled when we launched in 2017. What are a few of the biggest changes since then?
Damola Ogundipe: In 2018, we chose to pivot from building a consumer mobile app that connected constituents to policy, to building a B2B software solution that connects policy professionals with better legislative insights. We pitched the idea during Google for Startups' Black Founders Exchange. Venture capitalist Arlan Hamilton was a judge during that pitch competition, and she wrote us our first investment check, which helped validate our new direction.
From that first check, we participated in startup accelerator programs like Techstars, and we've raised over $2.6 million from notable investors like M25, ffVC, The Syndicate Fund, Incite Ventures, Backstage Capital, Comeback Capital, Purpose Built Ventures, AVG, Higher Ground Labs and WillowWorks.
We've also closed notable customers, such as Comcast, The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and Fair Fight.
MI: How has the Civic Eagle team grown since 2017?
DO: We've grown our company from three part-time founders just trying to figure things out in 2017, to a team of 12 full-time engineers, product and sales professionals based across the country. We were intentional about building the company as a fully remote team so that location wouldn't be a barrier to our growth.
MI: So what is Civic Eagle working on in 2020? Anything related to the election?
DO: This year, we've been focused on reaching more policy professionals, advocates and government relations teams with information about our software. We know that legislation and policies in states across the country are moving quicker than ever as a result of Covid-19, civil rights action and the upcoming election.
So our goal is to provide awareness about how our customers and other organizations are responding to these changes and how they're able to use our legislative tracking software to do so.
We recently hosted a webinar with the executive director of Minnesota Voice about how she's adjusting her nonprofit to work remotely. We'll be hosting upcoming webinars about what voter equity organizations can do to successfully advocate for fair election practices in the 2020 elections.
MI: What does Civic Eagle hope to accomplish in the next year or so?
DO: We're excited to continue to introduce our software to more policy professionals and government relations teams. We're a product focused-team, so we know that the more users and user feedback we can get, the better the product will be.
