Statt Inc., a Silver Spring startup developing software tools to help public affairs and communications professionals quickly digest information, has raised $2.8 million in new funding to rapidly expand its workforce.
CEO and Co-Founder Steve Glickman said he expects the company to triple its size to 15 employees in the next six months, both in Silver Spring and in Austin, Texas, where it has a second headquarters. Sales and marketing roles will be filled locally as the company looks to hire engineers in Austin.
Statt's suite of tools, all of which rely on artificial intelligence developed either in-house or from off-the-shelf providers, let its customers gain faster access to insights and analytics on any number of topics in seconds. Statt is able to do this via a database it has sourced with reams of reports and articles on national security, tax, health care, the environment and other public policy matters.
Despite its small staff, the 4-year-old company has a customer base that includes Microsoft Corp., Visa Inc. and FTI Consulting Inc., among others. Glickman declined to share revenue figures.
Head of Product Andrew Platt co-founded Statt alongside Glickman in February 2020. Platt is a former Maryland lawmaker, serving in the state's House of Delegates from 2015 to 2019, and is a former congressional staffer. Glickman is a former senior economic adviser for the White House National Security Council and was once a committee staffer on Capitol Hill. They launched the company because they know from experience how time-consuming it can be to conduct research on public policy issues.
Statt is not the only company in the D.C.-area tech scene targeting the region's scores of public affairs professionals. D.C.'s Quorum Analytics Inc. this year launched its own AI-powered tool for public affairs professionals that can summarize complex bills or regulations in seconds, and the D.C. public affairs firm Delve recently established a separate company, Delve Deep Learning, that uses AI to help speed up the research process.
"I think for a long time the public affairs, public policy, government affairs sectors have been an industry that has been way under touched by technology for decades," Glickman said. "In many ways, it's an industry that operates in a similar way as it has for years and years and years."
The close on this seed round of funding brings Statt's total outside investment to $4.4 million since. Moneta Ventures, a Folsom, California-based early-stage venture capital firm, led the funding round for Statt. Clutch VC and Next Coast Ventures in Austin and NextGen Venture Partners in Baltimore also participated. NextGen also led Statt's $1.6 million pre-seed round in November 2020.
