The National Dataset of Local Government Decisions
The earliest structured signals of where the physical economy is about to move.
GovData is building the national dataset of local government decisions by aggregating and normalizing municipal legislative activity across thousands of North American jurisdictions (cities, counties, school districts). These decisions are often the earliest public signals of where housing, infrastructure, energy projects, logistics facilities, and other real-world investment will occur.
This creates early visibility into the local government decisions that shape capital deployment (measured in trillions of dollars) across real estate, infrastructure, housing, energy, procurement, and other regulated markets.
Every city publishes agendas, staff reports, motions, votes, and attachments. But this information is scattered across thousands of disconnected portals and vendor systems. GovData builds the infrastructure that turns this fragmented information into a searchable national decision layer for investors, researchers, journalists, AI companies, operators, policy teams, and institutions.
Built by the original architect of Legistar.
Designed for national-scale normalization, search, analytics, AI, and enterprise distribution across the decisions that shape real-world capital deployment.
High-impact economic decisions are public, but practically invisible
The physical economy runs through local government, but the underlying data is fragmented, inconsistent, and difficult to monitor at scale.
No single source of truth
Agendas, staff reports, attachments, motions, and votes are published through disconnected vendor systems and custom portals with inconsistent structure.
Too late to act
By the time a signal appears in permits, filings, commercial datasets, or press coverage, the strategic advantage is often gone.
No national decision layer
Existing vendors primarily serve individual jurisdictions. They were not built to normalize local legislative decisions across the country in real time.
What the dataset actually contains
GovData reconstructs the legislative decision chain in a normalized form that can be searched, linked, and distributed nationally.
Together these records form an early structured layer of information about how cities approve housing, infrastructure, procurement, land use changes, and other decisions that shape the physical economy.
Meetings
Council, board, committee, planning, and other public meetings with structured metadata and jurisdiction context.
Agenda Items
Agenda items, matter records, topics, and related legislative objects linked to the meetings where they were considered.
Attachments
Staff reports, ordinances, packet documents, exhibits, and supporting files that often contain the real substance behind a decision.
Outcomes
Motions, votes, sponsors, timestamps, and related decision outcomes that make local policy movement traceable over time.
Building the national pipeline
This is a national data infrastructure problem, not just an AI problem.
Local legislative data is not published through a single standard. It exists across systems such as Granicus, CivicPlus, Municode, and many custom municipal portals.
Some expose APIs. Some require crawling. Some use heavy JavaScript. Even within the same vendor platform, implementations vary significantly from city to city.
- Discover thousands of municipal portals
- Extract the full decision chain from heterogeneous systems
- Reconstruct legislative workflows across vendors and custom portals
- Normalize inconsistent schemas into a unified model
- Maintain updates continuously as public portals change
National scale across major legislative platforms
The pipeline is already operating at meaningful scale and expanding as new portals are discovered and onboarded.
- AgendaQuick
- BoardDocs
- BoardEffect
- Boardable
- Catalis
- Civica (Modern.Gov)
- CivicClerk
- CivicPlus
- eScribe
- Granicus
- Hyland (Sire / OnBase)
- iCompass
- IQM2
- JCG Technologies
- Legend Software
- Legistar
- MinuteTraq
- Municipal One
- Municode
- NovusAGENDA
- OnBoard
- OneMeeting
- OpenMeeting
- Peak
- PrimeGov
- Simbli
- Swagit
- TownSuite
- Custom municipal portals
Built by the original architect of Legistar
GovData is grounded in decades of domain-specific knowledge about how local legislative systems actually work.
My name is Darius Tajanko, and I designed the original Legistar data model that linked meetings, agenda items, motions, votes, sponsors, and attachments into a coherent legislative system used by hundreds of major U.S. cities.
GovData extends that understanding beyond individual jurisdictions to create a national decision dataset built for cross-jurisdictional analysis, alerts, licensing, AI workflows, and public-facing products. It allows patterns and signals to be observed across thousands of governments simultaneously.
Generic scraping can collect pages. Generic AI can summarize text. But understanding how a municipal decision moves through an agenda, packet, motion, amendment, and vote requires domain modeling.
GovData is not just reading local government meetings. It is reconstructing the decision layer of local government at national scale.
Three products, one underlying dataset
The same normalized decision layer supports licensing, signals, and public-facing products. Each creates a distinct revenue path while compounding the value of the dataset and reinforcing GovData's position as early-decision infrastructure for the physical economy.
GovData Dataset
Bulk access to the normalized municipal decision dataset through Snowflake Marketplace, APIs, and direct data exports.
Customers receive early visibility into policy and regulatory signals that often precede permits, filings, or commercial datasets.
- Customers include hedge funds, PropTech, AI companies, civic tech, researchers, and media
- Eliminates the need for customers to build their own scraping and normalization stack
- Supports custom analytics, search, model training, and enterprise workflows
This is the core asset.
Near-term: $500K-$1M ARR within 12-18 months through early enterprise licensing and Snowflake Marketplace distribution.
Market context: The alternative data market exceeds $14B annually and is growing at 50%+ CAGR. Comparable policy intelligence platforms like FiscalNote and Quorum have scaled to $60M-$120M in annual revenue serving federal and state-level data. GovData addresses the local government layer, which is currently unserved at national scale.
GovData Signals
Early warning and monitoring for institutions that need visibility into policy and regulatory movement before it becomes obvious elsewhere.
These signals often emerge well before they appear in traditional datasets such as permits, filings, or construction activity reports.
- Zoning and land use alerts
- Housing density and short-term rental monitoring
- Infrastructure, procurement, and energy signals
- Decision momentum, controversy, and topic trend analysis
Signals is the monitoring layer derived from the same dataset foundation.
Near-term: $500K-$1M ARR within 18 months from early monitoring customers in real estate, infrastructure, and energy.
Market context: Intelligence products built on proprietary datasets routinely support $50K-$200K annual contracts with institutional buyers. The addressable market spans PropTech, infrastructure investors, and regulated-market intelligence.
GovData Portal
A clearer public and municipal-facing layer that makes local legislative records easier to search, summarize, and follow over time.
- Plain-language meeting and agenda summaries
- Linked topics, attachments, and outcomes
- Improved transparency without replacing existing city systems
- A second distribution path that strengthens the data flywheel
Portal broadens distribution and adds a municipal SaaS path.
Near-term: Initial pilot deployments within 12 months.
Market context: Municipal SaaS platforms like Granicus have scaled to $200M+ in annual revenue serving 4,000+ government clients. GovData Portal offers a lighter-weight transparency and search layer that complements existing city systems rather than replacing them.
Combined near-term target: $1M-$3M ARR within 18 months across dataset licensing, signals, and portal products.
Additional high-value workflows from the same dataset
GovData remains one company with one core asset. The same maintained decision layer can also be packaged for adjacent buyers whose work depends on seeing local government movement early, clearly, and across jurisdictions.
Track policy momentum before final passage
Trade associations, lobbying teams, and issue advocates can monitor where local policy is emerging, which committees are advancing it, and which jurisdictions are likely to move next.
See local rule changes before operations are affected
Multi-location operators can watch zoning, permitting, signage, parking, short-term rental, safety, and operating-rule changes before they become expansion delays or enforcement problems.
Find where projects can happen
Developers, utilities, and corporate expansion teams can surface markets where land use, infrastructure, and political conditions are aligning before projects become obvious in mainstream data sources.
Make the record more defensible
City attorneys, clerks, and IT teams can use the same underlying structure to strengthen record continuity, reduce archival and accessibility exposure, and answer process questions with confidence.
Price procedural risk earlier
Risk pools, insurers, and diligence teams can use public decision records as an upstream signal of governance quality, records fragility, and controversial approvals that may create downstream exposure.
Why this matters
These are expansion wedges, not separate companies. They widen the revenue surface area without changing the core story: GovData owns and maintains a national decision layer that other buyers do not have.
The moat is the maintained dataset and the pipeline behind it
Public data does not mean accessible data at national scale. Replication requires years of infrastructure work and continuous maintenance.
- Thousands of portals must be discovered and monitored
- Vendor systems differ in APIs, schemas, attachments, archives, and front ends
- Many deployments require custom extraction logic
- Normalization requires understanding the legislative chain, not just capturing text
- Updates must be maintained continuously as public portals change
The defensible asset
AI strengthens the product layer, but the durable advantage is the normalized national corpus of municipal decisions and the infrastructure required to keep it current.
In the same way Bloomberg did not win by inventing financial news, GovData does not win by inventing summaries. It wins by building the underlying decision data layer that others do not have.
Where GovData fits in the market
Several companies touch parts of this space. None are building the normalized national dataset of local government decisions across thousands of jurisdictions.
FiscalNote, Quorum, LegiScan
These platforms track bills, regulations, and policy at the federal and state level. FiscalNote reported $120M in 2024 revenue. Quorum reached $61M. They validate the market for legislative intelligence but do not cover local government decisions at scale.
Curate (FiscalNote)
The closest comparable. Curate scans meeting documents from 12,000+ local entities by keyword. Acquired by FiscalNote in 2021; both founders departed in early 2025. FiscalNote has since focused on divestitures and cost optimization.
Curate monitors documents by keyword matching. GovData reconstructs the structured decision chain in a normalized data model built for licensing, analytics, and cross-jurisdictional distribution.
Granicus, CivicPlus, Municode, eScribe, OnBoard
These companies sell meeting and agenda management tools to individual cities. Granicus alone reports $200M+ in annual revenue. They are the source systems GovData extracts from, not competitors in data aggregation. They were not built to normalize decisions across jurisdictions.
Zencity
Focused on resident sentiment analysis and community surveys for local governments. Has raised $91M. Does not aggregate or distribute legislative decision data.
Open States, Council Data Project
Open States covers state legislatures only. Council Data Project is an academic research tool covering a handful of cities. Neither operates at commercial scale or serves institutional data buyers.
Already operating at scale
GovData is pre-revenue but not pre-product. The dataset, pipeline, and distribution infrastructure are already live and growing at national scale.
Live and expanding
The national dataset is live and growing across 3,000+ jurisdictions. The extraction and normalization pipeline runs daily across multiple vendor platforms and custom municipal portals.
Enterprise channels in progress
Enterprise distribution through Snowflake Marketplace is in progress. The dataset is being prepared for API and direct licensing access.
Inbound demand across verticals
GovData has received inbound interest from prospective data buyers and is in active conversations across multiple verticals. Advisory relationships with domain participants are in place. Details available in direct conversation.
Seed round to scale the national decision layer of the physical economy
GovData is raising a $2M seed round to expand coverage, enterprise distribution, and product depth. Valuation and terms available in direct conversation.
Coverage and pipeline
- Expand jurisdictional coverage and historical depth
- Increase attachment and document extraction
- Harden extraction, normalization, and QA infrastructure
Revenue acceleration
- Launch and grow Snowflake distribution
- Convert enterprise licensing and signals customers
- Build a repeatable sales motion around early visibility use cases
Upstream and differentiated
- Early in the decision chain
- Cross-jurisdictional by design
- Valuable to investors, AI firms, media, and municipalities
GovData is building national decision infrastructure
This is not just a transparency tool and not just an AI summarization layer. It is a maintained national dataset of municipal legislative decisions - one that can be used to understand where the physical economy is moving before that movement becomes obvious elsewhere.
The Close
GovData can power licensing, alerts, research, AI workflows, and public-facing products from a single normalized foundation.
The strategic leverage comes from being early, structured, and cross-jurisdictional at the point where important local decisions are still being formed.
We are seeking investment and strategic partners to help scale the national dataset of local government decisions.
Thank you for your time.
I built the system that holds the history of our cities. Now I am building the system that makes their decisions legible at national scale. Those decisions shape trillions of dollars of investment in housing, infrastructure, energy, and development.