We're a small team with a narrow focus.
CivicOS exists because the gap between what municipal buyers need and what AI vendors offer had become untenable. We started by talking to fifty town managers. We were the only company most of them had heard of that did.
Local government runs America. It also runs on software written for someone else.
Over 19,000 municipalities in the United States. Most of them with fewer than 50,000 residents. Most of them running permitting, licensing, FOIL, and constituent services on software designed for enterprises twenty times their size. Or on email. Or on Excel.
The commercial AI wave arrived with a vocabulary that scared civic buyers for good reasons. "Autonomous agents." "Disruption." "Transform your business." None of that is what a town clerk is looking for. A town clerk is looking for a tool that respects the judgment involved in her work — and takes the drudgery out of it.
We built CivicOS for her. The CEO who wants a dashboard can have a dashboard. The resident who wants to report a pothole at 9:47 pm can do it in forty seconds. But the person we build for, first, is the clerk.
Four rules we've written down and use when we're deciding what not to build.
Civic, not generic
We don't sell to enterprises and hope town halls benefit. We sell to municipalities — and build exclusively for what that buyer needs.
Supervised, not autonomous
We will never ship an agent that sends a citizen-facing message without a staff member clicking approve. We've turned down features that blurred this line.
Transparent about AI
If an answer came from Gemini, we say so. If confidence is low, we route to a human. If the agent made an edit, we show the diff.
Accessible on purpose
WCAG AA isn't a compliance checkbox. It's the minimum bar for something residents will actually use on a Tuesday evening.
Four founders. Two have sat behind a municipal counter. Two have shipped production systems inside Google Cloud.
Sarah spent eight years inside municipal IT before concluding that the hardest problem wasn't technology. It was building software that respected civic workflows.
Marcus led Google Cloud's FedRAMP high-baseline work before joining CivicOS. He is the reason our security posture is not an afterthought.
Priya handled permits and FOIL in a town of 22,000 for six years. Every resident-facing surface is reviewed against her very-low tolerance for nonsense.
James authored the governance model. If a Gemini agent takes an action you wouldn't expect, he's the reason it also can't hide it.
We'll never pivot to consumer. We'll never sell to a non-civic buyer.
CivicOS is venture-backed, but the cap table includes civic-focused capital partners who have signed a letter of commitment to the municipal-only focus. We will not be acquired by an ad-tech company. We will not ship a resident data product.
It sounds like marketing. It's written into our fund docs.
Talk to us