Paul Bass photo
SeeClickFix founder and director Ben Berkowitz.
A Kansas-based “gov tech” business has purchased New Haven’s homegrown, internationally adopted problem-solving company —which only plans to stay, and grow, in the Elm City, according to its local founder and director.
On Friday, the Manhattan, Kansas-based company CivicPlus bought New Haven’s SeeClickFix, a digital information sharing company headquartered on Chapel Street that allows citizens the ability to report, comment on, map, notify public officials, and track government-led progress on everything from potholes to graffiti to illegal dumping.
Ben Berkowitz, who founded the local company in 2007, told the Independent Monday morning that he will remain as the director of SeeClickFix, and that the company will be staying put in New Haven. It currently has around 32 employees, he said, and plans to hire at least six new staff members as soon as possible.
“It wasn’t about timing for me as much as it was about the ‘who,’” Berkowitz said. SeeClickFix, which is used in hundreds of cities around the world, has grown into a “very dominant market leader” in the service request management and 311 space over the past decade, he said. “There really wasn’t any strong competition left for us.”
So he felt like his company had leverage to fetch terms amenable to his board. And CivicPlus, he said, was the only company he was really interested in selling to.
They are the largest provider of city websites, he said, with around 3,700 in the U.S. alone.
“This is an opportunity to really scale up quickly with their partners,” he said, “plus, to work on some increasingly interesting opportunities and problems within citizen engagement.” CivicPlus operates city platforms that touch more than just service requests, he said, thereby giving SeeClickFix an opportunity to grow into even deeper areas of citizen-government communication.
He said the sale, the amount of which he declined to share, also provided a financial return for his board members, team members, and all other investors in the company. “That box also got checked,” he said.
Most importantly, he said, CivicPlus is committed to keeping SeeClickFix in New Haven. The name is staying the same. He is remaining as director. The company is staying put on Chapel Street, and only growing in its number of employees.
“They are going to grow this business here in New Haven,” he said.