Here’s an article in the Washington Business Journal
We suggest LN should keep an eye out on this lot. The continued successes of companies like Fiscal Note continue to confirm that 2015 is going to be a big year of change in our industry.
Here’s the piece……
Following its recent $10 million Series B round, CEO Tim Hwang of FiscalNote told me the company’s ambition is to create a LexisNexis-like service that collects and analyzes legislative data at a global scale.
FiscalNote made its name with software that predicts legislative outcomes from federal and state lawmakers(with 94 percent accuracy, according to the company) using a wealth of historical data — everything from demographic info to individual voting records and ideologies.
The company is looking to expand this platform to a global scale, by providing analysis around international legislative trends. Some examples of developing trends that would be monitored by the platform: “The groundswell around marijuana legislation, how laws around plastic bag restrictions are propagating in many states, the spread of the Internet sales tax,” according to Hwang.
He added: “The idea is to look at these trends at a higher level.”
Hwang noted the more accurate term for what FiscalNote is looking to build would be “global legal analytics platform,” since similar domestic services lack the tools for comprehensive analysis of legal documents. He said the service is being marketed to lawyers, legal compliance professionals, lobbyists and academics.
LexisNexis and Bloomberg provide electronic databases for legal documents, cataloguing many millions of pages for lawyers and researchers. But being able to compare legal documents between countries, particularly as it pertains to comparing similar regulations, is an as-yet unexplored avenue for growth, according to Hwang.
FiscalNote is building out translation software as part of the process and is working to design additional workflow tools, including a “deep query system” that will allow for complex, natural language questions by users about legal documents.
Hwang said the latest fund will be used to expand product development, open new offices internationally and grow the company from 30 to 100 employees.
He would not be specific about the timetable for international expansion, but said Renren, which has been investing aggressively in startups in search of new revenue sources, will be partnering with FiscalNote on its Asia expansion. A European presence is also being considered.
“We’re making a big push for expansion, both domestically and internationally,” he told me, though he added “we’re still in the exploratory phase.”
San Francisco-based Visionnaire Ventures led FiscalNote’s $7 million Series A round, which closed in November 2014. The company has secured a total of $18.3 million in funding.
FiscalNote also recently introduced its Sonar product, which applies a similar predictive platform to the rule-making process at federal regulatory agencies.
