Column raises $30M Series A Round to continue building the company

This latest round of fundraising positions our team to continue building the company and the products we — and the folks using our tools — have dreamed about.”

Jake Seaton

Yesterday, we announced that Column has raised a $30M Series A Round led by Lux Capital. You can read the full coverage of our announcement in Axios.

The round brings the total funding we've raised to $33.3M and includes follow-on participation from seed investors Amity Ventures and Govtech fund, as well as our incredible roster of angel investors spanning the media, government and technology industries such as Marty Baron, Paul Bascobert, Claire Hughes Johnson, Henry Ward, Nick Sinai, David Chavern and Craig Forman.

Along with our Series A, we are also releasing our new website.

Column is on a mission to make public information systems more valuable, beginning with public notice.

Since our launch in September 2020, hundreds of media organizations across the country have adopted our first product: public notice software. This software helps these organizations serve tens of thousands of their clients — government agencies, legal services, banks, businesses and individuals — in the transaction of public notices.

And we’re just getting started. This latest round of fundraising positions our team to continue building the company and the products we — and the folks using our tools — have dreamed about.

How we are deploying our funds:

1. Scaling our core public notice product. Our public notice software is currently live in all 50 states, as well as the U.K. and Canada. We’re also in the early innings of rolling out our platform with a handful of significant media enterprises and this funding gives us the resources to do that right.
2. Expanding the value of public-notice transactions. We’re currently piloting services for Procurement Officers placing RFP notices to administer additional steps in the procurement process, for Trustees placing Sheriff Sale notices to manage virtual auctions, and for citizens placing a Notice to Creditors to utilize real estate services for the sale of a property — all within the Column software. These developments will not only deliver more value to our users, it will also reposition our publishing partners as facilitators and value-added partners to their customers on important transactions and life events, opening up expansive revenue-generating opportunities for the news industry.
3. Deploying the Column API. We have been using the API internally to power public notice databases across 18 states including California, Florida, Pennsylvania and Texas. By making the API publicly available, we expect to engage with media businesses, governments, academic researchers and businesses on ways to unlock new value in structured public information. Coming this fall is the public release of the first-ever Public Notice API which provides structured machine-readable access to 60+ notice type categories.

Column is a venture-backed public benefit company (B-Corp) — there aren’t many of those. We view this as a unique opportunity to chart our own course, serve our stakeholders and build a long-term, sustainable business that moves the world forward in a material way.

Jake Seaton is CEO and founder of Column.  He can be reached at seaton@column.us.