Votizen operates a social voter-network that helps users connect via Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook to influence elections. The company says it has connected over 480,000 voters and has about 20,000 active members, supported by an 11-person team. Votizen has begun amassing a large trove of U.S. voting data and is ramping up activities for the 2012 presidential election and down-ballot races. The company plans to engage the long tail of politics — Senate, Congressional and local races including school boards — to reduce the influence of money in politics. It also sees scope to expand internationally to other English-speaking countries such as the U.K., Canada, Australia and India. Recent fundraising will be used to expand Votizen’s footprint and hire engineering talent to grow the team. Votizen builds a service that authenticates users against voter rolls so representatives can verify messages come from actual constituents. The platform crosschecks submitted name, email, date of birth and sometimes address against lists of registered voters and routes messages to the correct representative. The company demonstrated the approach in a Votizen-powered Twitter campaign supporting the Startup Visa, where it delivered thousands of authenticated messages by hand to appropriate people. Votizen’s service is described as still taking shape and may evolve from the manual delivery used in that campaign. The company was founded by Jason Putorti and David Binetti and has hired Matt Snider as its first engineer. The startup announced it has raised $1.5 million in funding to support its development.

Total raised

$2M

Funding rounds

2

Latest round

Equity

Latest activity

Feb 2012