Founder Monthly Note, June 2026

June was a major step forward for Civoren. It was the first full month in our office, operating out of Nomadworks on 30th and Broadway.

The month of May had humble beginnings, with us putting together the bare necessities: chairs, tables, and going to Target for cleaning supplies. It was a lot to adjust to, working on Civoren full-time. Since the fall semester of our senior year, we had looked forward to the time when all we would have to think about or put energy toward was Civoren. Gone were the days of my college apartment living room, public spaces, my first post-graduate apartment, the Cornell Club, and working late nights after our day jobs. After getting set up and adjusted to our new lives in May, this was the first month where we were able to really start firing.

On June 12th, we launched our new site, which was completely and thoroughly redesigned. There were two goals. The first was to incorporate every bit of feedback we'd received from users on what they struggled with on our site or what they wished they had. The second was to give them something they didn't even think they could ask for: something beautiful.

Although I think I have an artistic sense, we needed a real artist to help us create something special. We worked with an artist I know well based out of Milan, who helped us with the intelligent, tech-forward, editorial, and important feeling of our new site. We want candidates to feel special when they log onto our site, and for voters to feel informed and confident. We are now proud to show our site to anybody. And if you meet us, trust me, we will show you.

With the launch came the formal announcement of several key advisors and early backers. We are pleased to have Tim Chi, co-founder of Blackboard and WeddingWire and former CEO of The Knot Worldwide; Dr. Amy Gutmann, former President of the University of Pennsylvania and U.S. Ambassador to Germany; Reggie Love, former Special Assistant and personal aide to President Obama; and Zach Leighton, former White House and State Department official, bring a range of experience and wisdom that complement our talents.

After launching the new site, we kicked off a candidate spotlight program that has been a huge success. Candidates really enjoy the interviews, and it is a pleasure to give them an audience, regardless of their party or where they fall on the ballot. We view this as a way to engage with our community of candidates and to showcase the depth and intrigue that often overlooked races may bring.

We also grew from roughly 500 to over 800 registered users, largely candidates, incumbents, and campaign-side users. They span the ballot, from governors and senators to school board and city council. Candidates and voters have also continued to reach out with positive notes and are increasingly engaging with us as a company. Our goal is to continue making the process of running campaigns digitally easier and easier. The most motivating part of Civoren for everyone working here is knowing our users actually care.

We also launched more than 10 paid pilots with candidates across the ballot, including judicial, school board, congressional, and gubernatorial races. The early pattern is clear. Candidates are using Civoren to be found, look serious, own their presence, and create a central home for their campaigns online. Our goal is for candidates to eventually run their campaigns from start to finish on Civoren, making the process easier from the moment they decide to run to the moment they win.

Beyond campaigns, we are also in active discussions with potential enterprise partners around licensing the underlying Civoren election graph. The demand is not just coming from candidates. Media, research, political intelligence, prediction markets, and civic technology organizations all need reliable election infrastructure, and Civoren is building the graph that can power it.

Let's get into some analytics. First, for some context, BigLeap.com writes that "The global average of monthly website traffic across all industries is around 5,000 website visits, with small businesses seeing an average of only 1,111 visits." In the three weeks since launching our new site, we reached over 100,000 page views.

Further, our bounce rate continues to improve, and people are clicking on more pages per visit. According to Alexander Jarvis, "Page views per session measures average pages viewed during a user visit, with healthy SaaS metrics ranging between 1.7-4.0." We are above 3.5, approaching 4. Of the people who do not bounce, visitors engage with 7.5 pages on average. That is markedly above industry benchmarks.

Behind the scenes, the most important progress was technical. Civoren is building a new operating layer for American elections: a living graph of candidates, offices, races, districts, regions, sources, timelines, and campaign activity. This is slow, tedious, difficult infrastructure work. That is why most people have avoided it, and why Civoren has the chance to build something others cannot easily replicate.

In June, we made major progress on the systems that power Civoren's election graph. These systems help us find, organize, verify, reconcile, map, and update election information across thousands of offices and geographies. We improved the context graph behind the platform, including how it tracks sources, timing, geospatial relationships, and confidence for each piece of data. We also laid more of the foundation for natural language search across live candidate, race, office, and geography data. By the end of the month, we had mapped over 100,000 offices and 60,000 regions, with the broader graph reaching over 1,000,000 nodes and 2,500,000 edges.

The reason users care about what we are building is that elections have been overlooked for too long. Innovation tends to happen where it is easiest, and elections are not easy. They are fragmented, sensitive, and difficult to get right. But that is also what makes the opportunity so important. Voters want to read from candidates directly. Candidates want to own something. There is nowhere that does that better than Civoren. Our goal is to democratize elections by building the modern infrastructure they deserve.