FiscalNote

FiscalNote Holdings, Inc., or commonly FiscalNote, is a publicly traded software, data, and media company headquartered in Washington, D.C. The company was founded by Timothy Hwang, Gerald Yao, and Jonathan Chen in 2013. FiscalNote provides software tools, platforms, data services, and news through the FiscalNote Government Relationship Management (GRM) service, its core product.

According to founder Timothy Hwang, in an interview with ''Entrepreneur'' magazine in 2017, the GRM "aggregates legislation, regulations and government filings from thousands of federal, state and local agencies, uses artificial intelligence to structure it and normalize it, and delivers personalized data feeds to companies to show how government may be impacting their businesses."

FiscalNote seeks to modernize the outdated government relations system in an effort to communicate from companies to the government level using artificial intelligence. FiscalNote also uses software that attempts to predict the likelihood a bill will pass based on certain key phrases and historical precedent. Information presented in these predictions includes the strengths and weaknesses of the bill compared to historical figures, a timeline of the committees it has passed, and the likelihood it will survive. FiscalNote to the present day has also expanded into the media space since the addition of CQ Roll Call and released ESG Solutions to cater to the environmental, social, and governance niche.

History

FiscalNote was founded in 2013 in Sunnyvale, California, by Timothy Hwang, Gerald Yao, and Jonathan Chen, who were friends from Thomas S. Wootton High School in Rockville, Maryland. Hwang, having finished his junior year at Princeton, brought Chen and Yao together to Silicon Valley to start the company. The company was founded in a Motel 6, where early employees Dan Maglasang and Dev Shah worked to build the product.

In May 2017, FiscalNote announced its initial expansion outside the U.S. providing data sets for Australia and New Zealand.

In June 2017, DC Mayor Muriel Bowser announced a major job training program alongside FiscalNote, named as one of the largest software employers in the District of Columbia. The mayor announced a $750,000 economic development package for FiscalNote as it moved its headquarters to 1201 Pennsylvania Avenue.

In July 2017, FiscalNote announced the availability of data sets for Argentina, Canada, Chile, India, and the United Kingdom.

In 2018 FiscalNote acquired CQ Roll Call which helped bring stable financial flow with a consistent subscriber base and a competent data set. By adding CQ Roll Call, FiscalNote gained an entryway into the media world and an opportunity to cover what certain bills may mean to subscribers instead of having to interpret the raw data.

FiscalNote ESG Solutions was unveiled in 2022 to assist clients in environmental, social, and governance goals, risks and regulations. Through the creation of ESG, FiscalNote has changed from being a data and media source and has transformed into an AI system capable of interpreting raw data and relating it to the specific issues of customers.

Funding and acquisitions

In late 2013, FiscalNote received early seed money from Mark Cuban after a cold email from Timothy Hwang. This was soon followed by an investment from New Enterprise Associates, Yahoo cofounder Jerry Yang, and First Round Capital leading to a total $1.3 million round.

In fall 2014, FiscalNote received $7 million in its first institutional (and second total) financing round. Investors included AOL Founder Steve Case, Visionnaire Ventures (a joint fund between Taizo Son and Temasek), with participation from Jerry Yang, Mark Cuban, New Enterprise Associates, Winklevoss Capital Management, Enspire Capital, Green Visor Capital (led by former Visa Chief Executive Joseph Saunders, and Middleland Capital. Steve Case invested as part of his Rise of the Rest Fund.

In February 2015, FiscalNote announced that it had raised $10 million in a third round of financing. Investors included Chinese social network Renren.

In February 2016, FiscalNote raised another $10 million in a fourth round of financing. The round was led by Green Visor and Visionnaire. FiscalNote later added $5 million to this round with a strategic investment from South Korean conglomerate MoneyToday Media alongside a strategic partnership with its newspaper and television divisions (MTN). This came after FiscalNote's acquisition of MyCandidate in Korea.

In August 2017, FiscalNote acquired 16-year old Baton Rouge company VoterVoice, bringing 1,100 new customers and expanding into the advocacy space. FiscalNote CEO Hwang announced that the acquisition would be the first in "hundreds of millions".

In January 2018, FiscalNote announced at the World Economic Forum in Davos that it had acquired a Brussels-based counterpart called Shungham, giving the company a foothold in the European Union as it seeks to expand globally.

In July 2018, FiscalNote announced that it would acquire ''Congressional Quarterly'' and ''Roll Call'' from The Economist Group.

In January 2021, FiscalNote announced it had acquired FactSquared, the parent company of White House tracker Factba.se.

In February 2021, FiscalNote announced that it had acquired Oxford Analytica, a UK-based political risk consultancy and publisher of the Oxford Analytica Daily Brief.

On September 15, 2021, the company announced the acquisition of Cambridge, Massachusetts-based artificial intelligence company Forge.AI.

In August 2021, Curate, a Civic Technology company that provides data to help companies monitor risk and provide clarification at the local government level was acquired by FiscalNote.

In 2022, Aicel Technology, a South Korean alternative data company that specializes on new-coming fintech companies was acquired by FiscalNote.

Operations

FiscalNote is headquartered in Washington, DC with regional headquarters in Seoul, Korea covering Asia and Brussels covering the European Union and the Middle East. Other major offices are in New York City, Baton Rouge, Gurgaon, India. FiscalNote operates in multiple languages and as of January 2018 had over 1,300 customers and over 21.9 million users.

Advisors and board

FiscalNote's board includes General Stanley A. McChrystal, Glenn Hubbard, Alec Ross (author), former Obama White House cabinet secretary and former Deputy Secretary of Labor Chris Lu, Congressman Mike Ferguson, Congressman Glenn Nye, and former publisher of the ''Washington Post'' Katharine Weymouth. FiscalNote also added Jayson Kim, General Partner of Legendary Ventures, and Mitch Shue, the former Chief Technology Officer of Morningstar, to their advisory board in 2021.

Recognition

FiscalNote was named to the CNN 10 in 2014

FiscalNote won the Technology Pioneer Award and Distinction at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in 2016.

During the 2017 special presidential election in South Korea after President Park Geun Hye was impeached, FiscalNote launched nudepresident.com, matching South Korean voters with their ideal choice for president using artificial intelligence, correctly predicting that President Moon Jae In would be elected. The mobile application received over 5 million users in several weeks.

In late 2017, FiscalNote researchers discovered that millions of comments submitted to the FCC during the net neutrality debate were forged using bots. Researchers used a variety of natural language processing techniques to uncover the anomalies. Ironically, it was later reported that many of those comments were generated by a FiscalNote subsidiary.

FiscalNote regularly uses its data to publish rankings of lawmakers and their effectiveness.

Curate, a technology platform owned by FiscalNote, won a global award for the best global innovation at the 2022 SAAS Awards.

Civic technology

FiscalNote is a tool of civic technology as it provides organizations or companies with real time governmental policies. This connects companies to the government, allowing them to take notice of what policies may impact their business and allowing companies to stay in compliance while pursuing future goals. In addition, FiscalNote could also help the government gain the public's trust by providing transparency in their actions and policies. FiscalNote could possibly provide insight into more streams of Civic Technology such as providing information to citizens about the different policies representatives are associated with and how that would impact their daily life by voting for them. Another use of FiscalNote is to utilize the extensive dataset they provide to conduct research about different administrations or ideologies in government.

Controversy

FiscalNote has been criticized for the high price of its service, which critics claim excludes citizens and smaller lobbies that cannot afford the product whilst providing wealthier lobbies with information that leaves them better equipped to protect their clients and self interests.

FiscalNote has also been criticised for putting undue weight on correlations in previous data that may not necessarily provide relevant insight as to why a certain bill passed or failed. Additionally, John Wilkerson, a political science professor at the University of Washington, criticises FiscalNote for putting undue weight onto whether individual bills move forward, rather the policies behind them.

References

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Financial software companies
Software companies of the United States
American companies established in 2013
Software companies based in Washington, D.C.
Software companies established in 2013
2013 establishments in Washington, D.C.
Special-purpose acquisition companies