10th anniversary, FiscalNote leaders reflect on 10 years of AI

DC’s FiscalNote has come a long way in 10 years, having raised $625 million, acquired over a dozen companies, and gone public.

Founded in 2013, the policy software company is celebrating its 10th anniversary this summer. For Founder and CEO Tim Hwang, the past decade has seen tremendous growth, changes in the AI industry, and major economic shifts. And for local leaders, the journey is far from over, especially as generative AI takes the world by storm.

We at Technical.ly first wrote about FiscalNote in October 2013, when the company raised a $1.2 million seed round from First Round Capital’s Dorm Room Fund, New Enterprise Associates, and Mark Cuban. , all before it officially launched. But Huang said the company started when three new graduates “opened up their laptops and started coding,” living in a Motel 6 for the first year because they couldn’t pay their rent.

After that first round, the company grew to about 10 employees the following year, and 30 employees the following year, Huang said. Since then, the number of employees has increased from 80 to 150, reaching a huge scale of about 800 worldwide in 2023. At the same time, the company continued to raise funding from his $10 million in 2015 to his $160 million in 2020.

“It’s been a very planned and linear business growth,” Huang told Technical.ly.

Huang said Fiscalnaut management decided in 2017 that they wanted the company to grow on a larger scale and saw an opportunity to integrate and acquire the “orphan business.” Since then, the company has made more than 10 acquisitions, including CQ Roll Call, Penn Quarter peer Fireside, Australia’s TimeBase, FactSquared, parent company of Factba.se, and Oxford Analytica in the UK. These assets are spread across the US, Europe and Asia.

Such a global presence is very different from its early days, when many didn’t even understand what the AI-based software company was doing, Huang said.

“On startup pitch days, I remember pitching the fiscal note over and over again in front of investors, bankers, executives and candidates,” Huang said. “And a lot of people couldn’t understand what we were doing.”

Today, FiscalNote graduates have gone off and started their own successful companies. Moreover, the market appears to be very different from when the company was founded. Huang said there has been an explosion of public and customer interest in AI over the past nine months. We hope this will give Fiscal Note an advantage in leveraging this technology. good bye.

With that in mind, Huang said he is committed to staying with the company after the IPO. He hopes Fiscalnaut will grow five to 15 times its current size, and will continue to expand geographically and enter more government businesses. He wants to enhance some of FiscalNote’s existing platforms around key government issues like misinformation. And I’m excited to see how public interest will help him grow his AI.

“Certainly before last year, it was a challenge to be an AI company,” Huang said. “Now I think it’s finally starting to get interesting in terms of the level of interest and opportunity and the potential of the market as a whole.”