ElectNext Raises $1.3M To Provide Contextual Political Data To News Sites

If knowledge is a door to information, data is the key. When you’re talking about politics and government, information is extremely important to those who are making decisions on who to vote for and what legislation to get behind or block. Today, a company called ElectNext has raised a seed round of $1.3M led by Brooklyn Bridge Ventures along with other strategic investors like Liberty City Ventures, Comcast Ventures, Digital News Ventures, Gabriel Investments, The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and Investor?s Circle. When I spoke with ElectNext’s founder and CEO, Keya Dannenbaum, she explained ElectNext as something similar to our own CrunchBase, providing widgets full of data for publications to embed: “We have a comprehensive underlying database (on politicians on our case as opposed to companies in the CrunchBase analogy) from which we create data-driven content that lives inside, and gives relevant context to, political news.” Dannenbaum knows politics, as she’s worked on 18 political campaigns, including Hillary Clinton’s. ElectNext’s product, which pulls together political data from multiple sources and packages them together for news sites to embed, is something that Dannenbaum thinks is important for both voters and journalists. Most political data is stored in formats that aren’t accessible online, so ElectNext is working with national and state partners like The Sunlight Foundation, GovTrack and Follow The Money as well as open data-friendly cities to convert all of it. One of the cities, my hometown of Philadelphia, is a close partner. Embedded profiles will start appearing today on PBS NewsHour, The Philadelphia Inquirer, NBC Politics and a few others. The six launch partners represent 15M monthly unique visitors, Dannenbaum tell us. That’s not a bad start. I talked to Dannenbaum about how her experience makes ElectNext unique and how important this information is to unlock for constituents: TC: What did you learn during your years working on campaigns that led you to working ElectNext? Dannenbaum: Through my campaign experience, first in the 2008 Presidential and then at the hyper-local level, I got to observe firsthand how sharply levels of political knowledge and participation decline from the national to the neighborhood levels. Yet it’s our local representatives who make most of the decisions that affect our daily lives. So we’re all checking out precisely where it matters most, and I wanted to change that. TC: How does data help shape political campaigns and inform voters? Dannenbaum: In

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