This episode of Voices in Local Government focuses on more efficient ways for local governments to buy the products and services they need to better serve their communities.

We examine the ever-evolving relationship between state/local procurement and finance.

As the macroeconomic environment becomes more challenging, public servants are an attractive new category of buyer for startups.

In this episode of the Amazing Cities and Towns Podcast, sponsored by Bearing Advisors, Jim Hunt interviews Mariel Reed, the Co-Founder and CEO of Pavilion. Listen to a candid conversation about getting more private businesses working on local government and community issues with technology, products and services, and much more.

Pavilion CEO and co-founder Mariel Reed talks about how government and technology are the two most important tools for improving lives at scale, and her goal of improving public purchasing for state and local agencies.

"Why You Should Join" is a monthly newsletter highlighting early-stage startups on track to become generational companies. In this newsletter, Stanford students Eric Zhou and Usman Hanif share what makes Pavilion unique in the government technology space, the problem Pavilion is solving, a look into the Pavilion team, and how Pavilion is positioned to make massive positive impact at scale.

While it’s not something your average American pays much attention to, government procurement is an overlooked industry that affects virtually all citizens, yet it remains largely offline.

In a special Strategy Session episode of Masters of Scale, four entrepreneurs sat down with Reid Hoffman to ask their burning questions about strategic communication — the art of storytelling about your company, your product, and yourself.

The pandemic changed our relationships to work and our families. For government technology entrepreneur Mariel Reed, becoming a parent while starting a business during Covid-19 helped her establish a healthier relationship with her work and redefine what it means to build a legacy.

The new “diversity filters” from Pavilion can help users of cooperative contracts find more local and diverse businesses and encourage national suppliers to work with those businesses, among other tasks.

Mariel Reed is co-founder and CEO of Pavilion, a venture-backed marketplace for state and local public procurement. Pavilion enables public servants to save time and money by purchasing from suppliers that have been pre-qualified by other public entities, and helps reduce the cost of selling into the $2T state and local public sector for businesses.

Now public buyers with accounts on Pavilion will have a more purpose-built experience—seeing more useful, tailored information that matches your contract discovery needs, right from an updated homepage.

Starting for public entities in Oregon, Texas, California, Virginia, Florida, and Arizona, Pavilion has made it easier than ever to see state and federal business credentials for suppliers alongside shareable contract information, all in one place.

Katie Wong joins Pavilion's engineering team. She previously worked for Snapchat as a full-stack engineer and graduated from USC Viterbi School of Engineering . In this interview, learn about Katie's favorite music and hobbies.

Vanessa Lauf is Pavilion’s Head of Platform Data. She will lead the team in acquiring contract and supplier data to support Pavilion’s growth. Read more to learn about Vanessa’s passion for impact, cooking, and reading.

Garret Meier is Pavilion’s newest software engineer. Prior to joining Pavilion, they were a full-stack, senior software engineer at Culture Biosciences and Mixmax.

We’re excited to introduce an updated look and a new name: Pavilion. Formerly known as CoProcure, Pavilion helps public servants save time and money by collaborating on purchasing.

Lillian Zhao will help Pavilion build playbooks driving our go-to-market efforts with public entities. She is a proud graduate of Dartmouth College, and is an avid reader, as well as photographer! Read more to learn about Lillian’s path to Pavilion and hobbies!

Shane’s experience in developing software spans many sectors including eCommerce, healthcare, and entertainment. He has also worked for the United States Digital Service in building the system managing all veteran legal appeals. Read to learn about Shane’s love for swing dance, meditating, and watching football.

With his background in education and customer onboarding, Ryan will help guide Pavilion users and design a delightful onboarding experience. Read more to learn about Ryan's passion for hockey, vinyl records, and tennis.

With her experience in EdTech, Monica will work on all parts of Pavilion’s software product building new features, systems, and improvements. We sat down with Monica to learn how she came to join the team, her favorite books, and her motto. 

Julie joins Pavilion from Quip and is a proud graduate of Stanford University. She'll use her experience in software development to continue building and improving Pavilion's products. Read more to learn about Julie's passion for video games, reading, and hanging out with her family.

A new partnership between Pavilion and Bonfire aims to help government procurement teams discover shareable contract opportunities to save time and money. 

Dion comes from ed-tech and will use his creative and strategic thinking to drive Pavilion's top-line metrics and government user engagement. In this interview, learn about Dion's hobbies, goals, and theme song.

Get to know our first engineering manager, Logan Davis! In this interview, learn about Logan's passion for technology, teamwork, and journey to Pavilion.

Using her experience in public policy and social impact work, Kelechi will support public servants and bring learnings from those users back into the company to help us improve our product. In this interview, Kelechi discusses her passion for reading, audiobooks, The French Chef.

Pavilion and OpenGov are thrilled to announce their partnership, which will provide OpenGov Procurement’s customers access to Pavilion’s marketplace of shareable contracts accessible directly from the OpenGov Procurement Suite.

With a background in education and health care administration, Chloe will captain our company events, onboarding processes, and office operations. We sat down with Chloe to learn more about her reasons for joining Pavilion, hobbies, and favorite quotes. 

Ryan graduated from Williams College, where he was absolutely sure he was going to go into academia. Before joining Pavilion, he co-founded a (now defunct) ticketing platform startup, dabbled in a quant hedge fund, and was on the engineering team at Dropbox.

Before joining Pavilion, Felix was a full-cycle recruiter at Pinterest and Tubi. Felix is a Bay Area native, an adventurous foodie, and a soon-to-be dog-dad.

Pavilion has raised a $22M Series A led by Forerunner Ventures, with participation from existing investors Leadout Capital and Neo, as well as marketplace and ecommerce founders we admire: Marco Zappacosta, founder of Thumbtack; Dan Lewis, founder of Convoy; and Katrina Lake, founder of Stitch Fix.

Prior to joining Pavilion, Siyuan designed software tools at Netflix and Autodesk that empower creative studios around the world. With her background in human-computer interaction and operations research, she seeks out ways to simplify complex systems and make information more accessible.

Carmen joins Pavilion with a diverse background in education, marketing, sales, and operations. At Barnard College in NYC, she studied Sociology and English, with a concentration in Creative Writing. She believes her interests and experience align around people and stories, and she’s excited to continue her professional journey at Pavilion, where she’ll get to draw on her myriad of experiences to further Pavilion’s own story.

Tim is a rural-to-urban, east coast-to-west coast transplant. His pursuit of social impact has led him to work across the public and private sectors on domestic and international projects and for both for-profit and nonprofit organizations. He graduated in 2020 from Yale University, where he co-founded a service, scholarship, and advocacy organization that supports independent youth (i.e. foster, emancipated, unaccompanied, estranged) in pursuit of higher education. Most recently, he was an early team member at a publishing startup that rescues out-of-print titles.

Abby graduated from UT Austin, where she founded the Texas Civic Tech Project, which brings together students passionate about STEM, tech, and politics and connects those students to community projects that utilize their technical skills. She joins Pavilion from previous experience at Affirm, Facebook, and HomeAway.

Jacob hails from the fast paced, high-stakes world of on-demand food delivery. Over the last 6 years, he’s developed demand forecasting models and optimized driver and delivery scheduling — all in the pursuit of delivering hot pizza.

With deep gratitude, we’re pleased to announce that Pavilion has raised an additional $2.4M in seed funding. This round was led by Neo and joined by existing investor Leadout Capital, as well as several strategic angel investors. This additional capital will ensure that during these turbulent times, we can stay laser-focused on our goal of building a marketplace for shareable public contracts.

Kate is a product manager who enjoys building technology for social good. Prior to joining Pavilion, she built products at Bay Area public media organization KQED, internet radio service Pandora, and edtech startup Coursera. Kate enjoys being outdoors, cooking for friends, having many beverages on hand at all times, and writing crossword puzzles.

Becca got her start with Code for America, where she saw the impact of improving technology with local governments. Since then, she’s partnered with state-level government in Australia to improve legal aid technology and helped build a non-profit organization that activates tech workers and companies on important civic issues.

Yvonne graduated from UCLA with a degree in CS, having led groups like ACM@UCLA focused on increasing technology accessibility. She has interned at Facebook on the Civic Integrity team, working on identifying coordinated harassment against at-risk individuals, and has also interned at Stripe on the Alternative Payments team. She loves working across the full stack from frontend UI to data, and strongly believes in working in technology for social good.

Jessica brings experience in backend web development, data engineering, and bioinformatics to Pavilion. Previously, she worked on data pipelines and web services for GRAIL, a cancer detection company.

In his first week, Mark has helped to launch Pavilion’s COVID-19 response, which supports government buyers across the country to purchase PPE and other critical response supplies. Over the last several years, Mark has used software to solve problems of the public interest, from supporting small business development with the City of Long Beach, CA to helping people clear old criminal records to building software for the treatment of opioid addiction.

Andrew is a serial entrepreneur and varsity athlete. He started his first business, a food delivery startup, as a senior at Middlebury College, where he studied Computer Science and Economics. Before joining Pavilion, he also started another company and completed a Masters in Entrepreneurship from the University of Washington.

Alicia Chen has joined Pavilion as cofounder and Chief Technology Officer (CTO). Alicia studied computer science at Stanford and started her career at Microsoft. She joined Dropbox as the company’s first female engineer, and went on to become one of the company’s top-rated engineering managers. Most recently, Alicia worked on products supporting improvements across education and criminal justice at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

We're thrilled to announce that we raised $1.5M for Pavilion, led by Leadout Capital and joined by Neo. We’re excited to begin working with Alison Rosenthal of Leadout and Ali Partovi of Neo, who bring extensive operating expertise and share our vision to improve how local governments spend $1.5T each year.