Now, it’s closed on a $30 million Series C funding round.
That puts the company’s fundraising total at more than $75 million, and more money in the Series C round may come in over the next couple of weeks. The newest round’s leader was Laurene Powell Jobs’ Emerson Collective, but in the past, the company’s backers have included Andreessen Horowitz and Thrive Capital.
Zac Bookman, OpenGov’s chief executive officer, said he wants to focus the new money on improving the software — including launching a new product or two later this year.
“We’re loading up to invest in R&D and … go big,” Bookman told Government Technology.
The company’s direction as of late has been adding new functionality to its software suite, primarily in the form of its budget builder. It now offers tools for open data portals, inter-agency reporting, budgeting and collaboration.
The budget builder in particular has led to some hard return-on-investment numbers, he said. Customers have reported cutting months out of their budget planning process, saving real dollars in the process.
“It’s all about ease of use,” he said. “That’s our No. 1 competitive differentiator and it’s something we’ve invested in competitively. It’s that no customer is too small.”
The company has also been building out its customer portfolio. In the past, Bookman talked about his pride in serving smaller communities, but now OpenGov is pulling bigger names into the fold — states like Ohio and West Virginia, and increasingly, some of the larger counties.
“We’re seeing a lot of the medium and large counties in the country come on, and we’re talking more and more with [chief information officers] in the country in cities, counties and school districts,” Bookman said.
He attributed both the growing county and CIO interest — as opposed to city and financial officer interest — to OpenGov’s evolution in the direction of centralized collaboration.
“Our intelligence package serves as a single source of truth across the enterprise that can unite the data across disparate silos across the organization,” Bookman said. “So the business case is probably stronger for counties than for anywhere.”
In the future, the company will also be looking to start serving governments outside the U.S.
“We haven’t done any international business," he said, "but we’re building our strategy.”
