Growth Street Partners today announced a minority growth equity investment in PublicInput, the leading public engagement platform for government. PublicInput will use the capital to strengthen its leadership position in a rapidly adopting market by accelerating investments in the company's product and go-to-market efforts.
Government agencies use PublicInput to connect with the communities they serve, increase equitable participation, and analyze data to deliver better governance. Some of the nation's largest and smallest local governments, state departments of transportation, transit authorities, and regional planning councils rely on PublicInput to engage and listen to their residents. These institutions have engaged more than 35 million people through PublicInput's platform.
Governments are increasingly focused on expanding their community engagement, including reaching larger, more diverse groups residing in their jurisdictions. According to a July 2020 Atlas survey of over 600 public officials, 50% of local governments now consider community engagement a top priority. Major events in 2020 surrounding the pandemic, social justice protests, and the national election demonstrate the importance of more constructive collaboration between government and the public.
Increasing equitable public engagement has recently gained national attention. Within days of his inauguration, President Biden issued an Executive Order to address environmental justice, launching the Justice40 Initiative to invest in disadvantaged communities. The order spurred the Environmental Protection Agency to, "[T]ake immediate and affirmative steps to improve early and more frequent engagement with pollution-burdened and underserved communities." PublicInput is uniquely positioned to address this need. By aggregating interactions with the public across online, in-person, and other low-barrier formats like phone and text, organizations can reach more people and overlay that participation data with census and EPA layers to ensure representative, equitable participation.
The focus on equity is part of a larger shift that PublicInput's technology is facilitating. Through the millions of data points collected from everyday people, governments are making better, more informed decisions by listening to the collective voice of the community, not just the loudest voices or those who are able to attend traditional public meetings.
"PublicInput has a diverse and growing community of government customers across the country, and we're committed to helping them solve the emerging challenges of public engagement. With Growth Street, we can invest in new technology and grow our ecosystem of organizations delivering government 'for the people, by the people'."
Jay Dawkins, CEO and co-founder of PublicInput
"Growth Street is excited to partner with Jay, his co-founder, Graham Stone, and the growing PublicInput team. The company's multi-modal survey and mapping capabilities are integrated with robust communications tools to provide government staff with an invaluable resource. The platform delivers both the efficiency gains government staff need to focus on public service and the digital platform critical to make representative and data-driven decisions on behalf of the communities they serve," said Steve Wolfe and Nate Grossman, the co-founders of Growth Street.
PublicInput
PublicInput is the operating system for over 200 public agencies and their consultants to communicate, listen, and make more informed decisions. The company provides the only end-to-end solution for the public engagement process and is composed of three core components: Public | Engagement Hub for data gathering, Public | CRM to aggregate and analyze that data, and Public | Contact to ensure efficient and ongoing communication. In building its all-in-one platform, the company's mission is to connect government agencies with the communities they serve and facilitate equitable participation and representative decision making. PublicInput is based in Raleigh, NC and is hiring.
Growth Street Partners
Growth Street Partners provides early growth capital to rapidly growing SaaS and technology-enabled services companies located in underserved U.S. markets. The firm partners with founders who have personally lived through the problems their businesses solve. Investments include Pear Deck, ChildcareCRM, Visual Lease, Hotel Effectiveness, Suralink, HR Acuity, Govenda, PikMyKid, and PublicInput. The firm has $200 million in assets under management across two funds (Fund I: $70M, Fund II: $130M).