Investing in Public Safety: Modernizing Law Enforcement Response

It’s a question we hear often at Kodex:  “You’re solving a really important problem. So why hasn’t anyone done this before?”

The answer is both simple and complex, and we set out to explore this issue and much more in a recent webinar with Kodex founder and CEO Matt Donahue and Bradley Tusk, Co-founder and managing partner, Tusk Venture Partners. It was a lively discussion which revealed why innovative solutions like Kodex, which serves both public sector agencies and large private sector companies, are starting to get more attention from technology investors. 

Below we summarize some key points from the discussion, however these are just brief excerpts. We encourage you to watch the full webinar recording here.

Understanding the long held venture capital aversion to investing in GovTech

As co-founder of the world’s first venture capital fund that invests solely in early stage startups in highly regulated industries, Bradley Tusk has a keen understanding of what makes the GovTech sector uniquely challenging. As he discussed in detail in the webinar, startups that plan to rely on revenue from government entities may be in for an uphill battle.  

“Government procurement is a miserable process, very slow, risk averse, and it’s bureaucratic and political. So any business that wants to generate revenue has to fight through all that,” Tusk said. 

However, he advised that doesn’t mean the sector should be ignored. Crunchbase put it this way: “It’s easy to miss that the public sector isn’t just the government anymore. In many cases, it’s one of the primary drivers of new growth for these businesses—a backdoor to getting the attention of the commercial Fortune 500 on both the public sector and the commercial side of the house.” 

Targeting the private sector side of GovTech equation is the solution to circumventing some of the entrenched issues with penetrating government agencies to secure contracts. Kodex takes this approach by working with public sector agencies to provide them a service that the company’s private sector clients - who also benefit from the solution - pay for. It’s proven to be a win-win for for everyone. But that doesn’t mean it was easy to convince others that the Kodex platform was the right way to solve the messy, risky, and costly process of responding to law enforcement requests.

From FBI Agency to Company Founder:  Why Experiencing the Problem Firsthand Matters

If you’re a startup founder or investor, you’ll appreciate hearing Matt Donahue recall how many times people either asked him why no solution like Kodex existed or telling him he was crazy to leave a secure job with the FBI to launch a tech startup. 

“When you work in government you have a better appreciation for how hard those jobs can be,” Donahue notes. It was his work on investigations at the FBI that revealed just how archaic and risk-prone the law enforcement response process was, and ultimately led him to create Kodex.  Like many other successful companies, Kodex was born of first hand experience with the problem that they set out to solve. 

“People think it’s as easy as you give me a subpoena, I give you back data. In reality, it is a lot more nuanced and complex,” according to Donahue. He explained that “Pre-Kodex,” companies were using Google Sheets, Dropbox,  Zendesk, or other tools to track various aspects of law enforcement requests, including compliance with privacy and data protection laws. There was no one tool that did everything, until Kodex.

Donahue also heard repeatedly that a solution like Kodex “would never be a business.”  Having worked directly with companies trying to get time sensitive data to solve a case, he knew that simply wasn’t true.  

“That mindset ignores the reality that law enforcement has been relegated to a templatized approach to subpoenas; the problem with that approach is that the world is ever-changing and so are companies.” 

In other words, each company's data sets, structures, types and access controls are unique. How could law enforcement possibly provide a request in a way that a company can quickly and accurately respond to?  Kodex solves that issue by onboarding companies and identifying their data types so depending on the type of request - subpoena, warrant or emergency data request - the agency can submit the request the right way to get a fast response.

Envisioning Kodex’s future and GovTech investing

In addition to the topic areas briefly highlighted here, both Tusk and Donahue had some interesting things to say about what opportunities are ahead for Kodex, and how the government can use technology to help society in new and exciting ways.  We invite you to watch the full webinar to get the most out of their discussion.