FiscalNote: Between classes, legislation prediction tool takes shape

Things moved fast for FiscalNote cofounder Jonathan Chen, UMD ’14. He built innovative software, launched a business, attracted a substantial investment from billionaire Mark Cuban, moved to his Washington, D.C. headquarters and hired nearly 20 people — all in less than a year and all while an undergraduate studying finance and computer science at UMD.

Chen and longtime friend Tim Hwang were college juniors when they first batted around the idea of aggregating government information. Hwang was president of the National Youth Association and a student at Princeton.

He had firsthand experience dealing with government data that was difficult and time-consuming to sift through. His idea was to create a platform to aggregate all the data in one place in a standardized way to make it easy to search and understand.

Chen entered the idea in a university entrepreneurship plan competition. The partners won second place, $1,500 in seed funding and parlayed the momentum to participate in a Silicon Valley venture accelerator program.

Along with friend Gerald Yao, the team started FiscalNote and spent the summer of 2013 building their platform, FiscalNote Prophecy. They also added a twist: A tool that could predict the probability that a bill would become law.

It was that new prediction engine that landed Cuban’s investment in September 2013, then brought along AME Cloud Ventures, NEA and First Round Capital’s Dorm Room Fund for a total of $1.2 million in seed round funding.

They launched their platform in December 2013 and quickly started scaling up with a growing list of clients.

“No one else in the industry has a tool to predict whether a bill will become law,” says Chen, FiscalNote’s chief technology officer. “Our clean, easy-to-use Prophecy platform aggregates legislation for all 50 states and at the federal level. Our tool tracks whether a bill will get to the voting floor and the likelihood that it will pass into law. We show an overview of the whole bill, including an analysis of the bill text, what industries will be affected, and all the legislators and committees involved with the bill. We map out which legislators will be most likely to vote ‘yes’ or ‘no.’”

Now Chen and his co-founders are focused on hiring the right people quickly and raising additional capital. Since graduating in May, he is able to focus full-time on building the business.