FiscalNote is a privately held software, data, and media company headquartered in Washington, D.C. The company was founded by Timothy Hwang, , and Jonathan Chen in 2013. FiscalNote provides software tools and platforms, data services, and news through the FiscalNote Government Relationship Management service, its core revenue-generating 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 is also the owner of CQ Roll Call, which it acquired from The Economist Group in 2018.
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. 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 expansion into Australia and New Zealand. In June 2017, DC MayorMuriel 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.
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 financing round. Investors included AOL Founder Steve Case, Visionnaire Ventures. 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.
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.
Corporate culture
The FiscalNote offices are flat. The office space places executives and employees shoulder-to-shoulder at identical desks.
FiscalNote regularly convenes proprietary events on topics ranging from central bank policy to trade and immigration. The company produces content and events for government affairs professionals in particular. Recent speakers include Governor Martin O'Malley, CFPB Director Mick Mulvaney, S&P Global CEO Douglas L. Peterson, Secretary of CommerceCarlos Gutierrez, and U.S. Ambassador for Special Political Affairs at the United Nations Stuart Holliday.
Recognition and impact
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. 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. FiscalNote won the Technology Pioneer Award and Distinction at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in 2016. FiscalNote was named to the CNN 10 in 2014 FiscalNote regularly uses its data to publish rankings of lawmakers and their effectiveness. During the 2019-2020 coronavirus pandemic, FiscalNote laid off 6% of the company, with one source telling AdWeek that the layoffs included the entire team of investigative reporters, and all but one staff member from the print magazine team.
