A man my die, nations may rise and fall but an idea lives on
- John. Kennedy
Brigade was started as a govtech company assuring its investors that it would instill the idea of politics into the youths who are apolitical. Brigade became the bridge between techno specialist, politicians and the local youth. They entered the market with an initial funding of 9 million dollars in its very first round at the year of 2014, The year 2014 turned out to be a fruitful year for them since they went on to buy another tech startup called the Votizen. The founding fathers made brigade to reach a post-money valuation in the range of $50M to $100M as of Aug 6, 2014, according to PrivCo.
The main motto of Brigade is to make civic engagement easy, effective, and enjoyable — and in doing so, restore political power back to the people.
The initial days investors at Brigade includes Sean Parker (co – founder of Facebook) and Matt Mahan (co-founder – Brigade) a full-time politician (Democrat). Sean Parker’s vision was to turn an entire generation into activists and philanthropists. Brigade helped in leveraging 250,000 votes in the 2016 Presidential elections held in America. The “Get out to Vote “trend started by Brigade helped 5 million people to brace themselves for an adventurous voting experience which had a great impact on the election results and on the American Economy. Brigade was visualised by a group of five individuals from different domain and it began to assist people from June 4, 2014 which was the first day the app came into existence. James Windon is the President of the Brigade platform.
He previously acted as a vice-president of Causes and earlier worked with the World Trade Organization in Switzerland. Matt Mahan is the CEO of Brigade and previously served as the CEO of Causes. John Thrall works in Engineering, Jason Putorti works in Design, and Miche Capone specializes in Production. Sean Parker is the Chairman of the startup. He sits on the board of Spotify and was the founding president of Facebook under this highly skilful leadership team Brigade underwent tremendous changes where it changed its version from private beta version to open beta version during the year 2016-18.
Brigade was an app which was in the pre development stage for 3 years with a crew of engineers, they were working seamlessly for the integration of technology and policy and thus trying to bring out change in the American democracy. “The mission of the company is to empower people in their civic life and to have influence over the direction their society goes in by having them articulate and identify where they stand on issues uncover alignment with friends, get organized into groups of like-minded people and ultimately act collectively to shape the policies that affect their lives,” said Mahan, who was previously the president and CEO of Causes.
The brigades receiving the Knight investment were among the most active. The new investment will be a five-year commitment, and it marks just another evolution for Knight’s support of CfA (Code for America). That relationship dates back to 2010, and it has now led to nearly $10 million of investment in the group.
Brigade built a lot of foundational technology such as high-quality voter matching algorithms and an entire model for districting people to their elected representatives. Brigade’s website is a culmination of 26 technological applications which are open source to some extent.
Brigade’s breakup casted a shadow on the space that includes MoveOn and Change.org. The major factor for its break up is that the Consumer-focused apps for improving democracy are tough to monetize. Brigade fell to more sustainable democracy-focused start-ups like grassroots mass-texting app Hustle or non-profits like Avaaz to arm the public with the equipment and knowledge necessary to participate in the political process. Given the deep polarization and animosity between nations’ political parties around the world, we need all the tools to amplify truth and civility we can get.
To further their contribution to the democracy innovation community, Countable agreed to let Brigade open-source its voter matching software before the sale. This makes apps to tie a user to their official voting record to offer personalized features, like reminders of upcoming elections, petitions for local issues and ways to contact their elected officials. Seth Flaxman, the CEO of civic tech software developer Democracy Works, which built Turbots, says, “This is extremely difficult technology to build and can help TurboVote determine which of our 6 million users needs more help registering to vote. They are passing the baton, making it possible for non-profits like ours to build off their progress.”.
The engagement factors of Causes have changed drastically after its Brigade acquisition, the below graphical representation shows the exact scenario after a successful acquisition.
The steep rise can be seen during the years 2018-19 which is the result of added Brigade users .
Pinterest acqui-hired the core engineering team pf Brigade and Countable managed to pull off the remaining assets of Brigade including its IP addresses. The value lay in the mind’s eye of the beholder, who, unbeknownst to me, was in thrall to mythic bears and bulls who swayed the bourses. Thus, proving the above theory two plus two equals four, where a small bird like Brigade flew high with its mighty technological wings but couldn’t sustain the heavy turbulence present in the environment due to which it fell prey to the big birds in the industry making the big birds healthy and preventing its starvation leading to a complete ecological balance of the political Economy of America.