Plural is working towards a world where public policy is transparent and accessible to communities; because, if you can’t see it, you can’t change it. In 2019 we launched Plural, our legislative intelligence and policy management software, for policy professionals to monitor, report and collaborate and create deeper insights on legislation. 

Today, our technology helps some of the nation’s leading organizations and advocacy groups track and investigate important policy from all 50 states, Congress, D.C. and Puerto Rico. Since 2019, we’ve doubled our funding, employed 13 full-time teammates, and have closed notable partners such as Comcast, Center for Secure and Modern Elections, and Fair Fight.

We know that our software tool relies on clean, reliable data in order to serve our users. At first, we started where we could, but quickly realized that we needed additional support if we wanted to build around complex state legislative data. We embraced Open States, the leader in open legislative data in the country. Over the past 2 years, we’ve collaborated with and contributed to Open States’ passionate community of volunteer engineers who support public data. As we began to look at the future of the Open States project, we saw an opportunity to be a permanent resource and to ensure continued access and transparency to this civic data.

Today, we are announcing our acquisition of Open States and the expansion of our product offering. This is a natural fit for us because we share the mission of empowering people to impact policy through innovations in technology and data. More importantly, Open States brings an invaluable vibrant community of technologists focused on civic data projects. Open States will continue to serve as a public resource for researchers and the greater community. In addition, Open States Founder James Turk has joined Plural as our Director of Public Data leading a team responsible for growing our political data infrastructure. 

We are excited about growing our team and furthering our investment in open civic data. This acquisition helps us with our mission of making the democratic process more transparent and accessible using technology. We believe that when we can see the workings of power around us, we can lend our voices to shape how that power is exercised.