Our ears perked up when we heard Boston-based Quorum was moving to DC as part of Washington DC Economic Partnership's Live Free in DC competition at SXSW, which found a startup that would fit well in DC and offered perks like office space. We chatted with co-founder Alex Wirth during the startup’s official first week here and learned six interesting facts about the company.
Quorum sells access to a database of all Capitol Hill legislation, votes, amendments, press releases, tweets, floor statements, staff contact info and Census data. The data is analyzed to understand who members of Congress work with most often on legislation as co-sponsors, what percentage of bills they get out of committee and passed, the top 1,000 or so issues, and who’s the most active, influential, bipartisan and effective in each. The product also offers a ranking algorithm of Congressional districts based on Census data, a bill text comparison tool and a tool that helps organizations develop scorecards on members of Congress.
The company has 21 employees, all recent college grads or currently in college. The founding team are recent Harvard grads Alex Wirth and Jonathan Marks.
Quorum officially launched its product in January and its clients include General Motors, Holland & Knight, Podesta Group and Glover Park Group. They pay $4,800 per user a year for access. Quorum is already profitable.
Quorum has no outside funding and raised seed funding through winning business competitions and grants.
The team works out of three DC offices: Canvas co-working space in Dupont, a house on Foxhall and an office at 17th and I. But they're often running around DC meeting with clients.
A recent research project found that women legislators introduce more bills and get more of them passed than men; women also work more with other women and with women across the aisle.
