constituent service platform into gov raising 25 million in a series b round.
The company builds itself as a constituent
relationship management tool that helps elected officials
improve the way that they organize respond to and engage those that they serve.
We'll start up services are being used by federal,
state and local governments across the country including
the U. S. House of Representatives.
So joining me now is the founder and ceo of indigo of Alex Coots,
Alex thanks so much for coming on.
I would imagine what some 53 billion messages
that elected officials get every single year.
How does your company make it easier to manage all of those inbounds?
Yeah, it's absolutely staggering.
It's an enormous amount of incoming communication that government manages.
First off,
the government is like charitably 10 to 15 years behind
the private market in terms of access to technology.
And so our goal as a company is to bring the
best of the private market all the way to government.
So they have the same types of tools that companies
have normally used to manage similar volumes of communication.
Classically they haven't had it, they've been using tools built internally by I. T.
People 15 20 years ago or legacy software platforms.
The government has now just begun to embrace SAS technology
for the first time which is what we are.
And so we build platforms that make it more efficient
for them to respond to people with fewer clicks,
less work,
they can track them and pull better
analytics so they understand exactly what the pulse
of their constituency is and they can
make sure that they are adequately represented.
Give me an example Alex of some top elected officials using this.
Yeah,
so we're always really cagey about who
our customers are from a security perspective,
so we never want to give out specific names.
But I will say that during Covid there were billions
of billions of requests that were coming into government,
the state government level,
also the federal government level and the local government level,
all of which we worked with.
And so these offices were fielding unemployment insurance requests,
companies were shutting down, businesses were closing and shuttering doors
and so they used our platform to be able to deliver aid to those people so
they could feed their families and keep their
businesses open to keep their communities going,
which were very, very proud of.
I'm just curious what's the use case Alex,
if someone's sitting in their office and they want to sort through a ton of messages,
maybe millions of messages, how does your technology make it easier to do that?
Yeah, so let's take a tangible example of everybody's dealing right now,
we've been dealing with a series of tragedies in this country,
which I'm sure have been covered
on your network.
In addition to a number of others,
there are people across the country who are dying to be
heard about opinions about gun control legislation in one direction or another
and they are sending their opinions
to elected representatives and unbelievable volume
And so these people are getting inundated with tens
of thousands in some cases messages a day.
And so if they don't have the tools to be able
to adequately triage and organize and group and tag those responses,
there's no way that they can
summary analytical data to understand what people are saying.
And so are our platform is able to ingest that
communication from every channel through which it comes in.
We are a multi channel communication platform.
So if you reach out to your elected representative via email, website,
social media, phone calls, faxes in person visits, whatever it ends up being,
that all ends up in our platform so that they can neatly organize it.
They can then triage and prioritize that male and
respond to each one of those people with either
approved responses they put in the system or new
ones that they write based on whatever people need.
And so our system allows them to work through 10-20 times the amount of mail
they could if they were using simple email or something else because it's much,
much easier to do.
And then they can pull summary analytical reports as well.
Let me ask you this, we are tight on time. This is absolutely fascinating.
And I think for many people in our democracy right now,
especially given the tragic incident,
the tragic mass shooting that we saw during uh this week earlier this week.
This is the type of solution
that could help hopefully in this country.
What's the cost to government officials?
Yeah,
So it varies on a different level of government and how many people are using it.
But we have like a traditional staffs company of per seat licensing fee,
the more users, the more it costs, but the more cheaply and more,
the cheaper we can make it at the individual price level.
And so we also charged for data packages
and website development and things like that,
that allowed people to connect on the front end with constituents better.
Thank you.
Chef Alex,
I hope you'll come back the next time you raise
more funding or have new technology to showcase here.
That's Alex co founder and Ceo of Indigo.