For Plural founder Damola Ogundipe, promoting better democratic outcomes wasn’t just a business opportunity—it was personal. Inspired by years of attempting to navigate the U.S. legal system as an undocumented immigrant, Damola and cofounder Yemi Adewunmi created an app to simplify civic engagement by combining elements of social justice with social media. Plural's Enview software allows organizations to track state and federal legislation, pinpoint focus areas, and access information about the policies that impact them, ultimately empowering users to become civic leaders.

Damola describes Plural’s clients as “organizations that need any sort of policy, advocacy, policy, lobbying or policy research. That ranges from nonprofit advocacy organizations focused on policy issues to big, high-risk, high-exposure corporations—whether from a compliance, legislative, or regulatory perspective.” From telecoms companies tracking broadband legislation to voting advocacy groups fighting against barriers to voting access, Plural provides transparency in a complex and ever-changing legal landscape. Plural also offers a free database, Open State, an open source project that uses AI to summarize bills across the United States, enabling anyone to have access to policy data. Yemi tells us it is important to Plural that they can “service both those who can afford the premium features as well as folks who are just curious about what's happening in their communities.”

The fast-moving nature of public policy requires advocacy groups to be equally quick on their feet, and AI has allowed Plural to create tech that can keep up with the latest legislative developments. For example, between January and April 2024, Plural's technology helped a coalition of 39 small advocacy organizations in Georgia influence all 19 bills signed into law in the 2024 GA legislative session, including this bill that helps increase government transparency. This was possible thanks to the platform’s automated AI bill analysis and monitoring update features, and Damola tells us, “Our differentiated value propositions would not exist without AI.” Plural’s platform surfaces key legislative insights, at both federal and state levels, in real-time and makes critical data accessible to the organizations they support. Damola continues, "We're in a competitive environment with a few legacy incumbents, however we're moving fast and creating a ton of new innovation in ways that the market we sell to hasn't seen before."

While their heads aren’t in the clouds, their business certainly is. The policy app is built on the Google Cloud platform and Plural uses many products under the GCP umbrella, including Google Cloud Composer, Managed SQL, Firebase, and Kubernetes Engine. "Google Cloud helps us manage all of our development storage needs now and as we scale," says Damola. "Google Cloud Tasks allows us to easily manage hundreds of thousands of tasks that our platform performs to process and maintain data." Google App Engine provides Plural with a fully managed serverless platform so Damola's team can focus on delivering value—and democracy—to users. Plural also uses ElasticSearch hosted on GCP through a partnership between Google and Elastic, and the company is actively engaged in R&D on AI features using Vertex AI tools including Gemini 1.5. Google’s programming language underpins the product—Plural’s performance-critical subsystem is written in Go.