On Wednesday, Esper, an Austin tech startup that helps governments create and manage public policy, announced it raised $8 million in fresh funding. The Series A was led by Cota Capital, with participation from 8VC, Gaingels and Stand Together Ventures Lab.
Esper was co-founded in 2018 by Maleka Momand, who, until then, had been serving as the president of Argive, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that provides free tech resources to government organizations. At the time, Momand says she noticed that these organizations were facing “tremendous challenges” during their policymaking process — limited institutional knowledge, high administrative costs, repetitive paperwork.
With Esper, she and her co-founders Joe Lonsdale and Lilli Oetting wanted to create something that could help regulators “focus on policy, not paperwork.”
“Government agencies are tasked with creating and enforcing thousands of policies every year, but lack a coordinated operating system to manage their work,” Momand told Built In via email. “Esper serves as a single source of truth for our customers to collaboratively create policy. Rich regulatory data, intimate knowledge of the regulatory process, and reliable workflow infrastructure is what sets us apart from legacy systems and outdated processes.”
Today, Esper’s cloud-based platform is used by various government agencies across the country, many of which are in the Texas state government. The company moved its headquarters from San Francisco to Austin shortly after its founding, and has raised $14 million in capital to date.
Back in 2018, “govtech” was still in its infancy, according to Momand, and its potential to transform the way governments run wasn’t quite understood yet. This has certainly changed amid the pandemic. A public health crisis like this has made clear and informed public policy more essential than ever, and the government (like every other sector) has had to digitize quickly.
“If there’s a silver lining to the past year, it’s that many governments have moved toward cloud-based software to support more remote-flexible work,” Momand said. “We’re witnessing a rapid adoption of SaaS in government, and we’re excited to be a part of this modernization journey to one of our oldest and most important institutions.”
To keep up, Esper plans to use this fresh funding to scale its operations and grow its team. The company has about a dozen open tech positions available now, most of which are “remote-flexible” says Momand.
