Socrata has raised $18 million to further the extension of its open-data platform now used at all levels of government to present information for the general public. The Series B round of financing was led by OpenView Venture Partners, with participation from existing investors Morgenthaler Ventures and Frazier Technology Partners.
The company has an open-data platform to pull information from silos where it has traditionally been stored. Socrata wraps the data and puts it in a modern interface for websites and through APIs. The cloud service is designed with connectors that allow the customer to schedule the delivery of the data from structured and unstructured databases.
I asked CEO and Founder Kevin Merritt about the NSA and how it correlates to Socrata’s work. He said Socrata has a platform at the other end of the spectrum designed to help put the government online to see what it is doing with the data and what can be built from it.
Socrata’s broad roadmap is to help civic developers build apps more efficiently. It recently introduced GovStat, which allows the customer to change the culture of government so it has a more data-driven approach.
Customers of the platform include San Francisco’s open government effort, the City of Chicago, Boston, Austin, the United Nations, the federal government as well as a number of other municipalities.
Socrata was founded in 2007 and raised a $6.5 million round in 2008.