How Marketplace.city helps local governments innovate

Governments worldwide struggle to modernize their systems and improve efficiency. Marketplace.city simplifies the process by giving local governments unique market insights to source, validate, and procure the right technology solutions — cutting through the complexity of public-sector procurement.

Across the world, many governments struggle to modernize their systems and improve operational efficiencies. Marketplace.city simplifies this process by providing local governments with unique market insights to help them source, validate and procure the right technology solutions. “The process of [governments] evaluating the market, engaging vendors, running a formal solicitation, it can take like a year or two years to do,” Chris Foreman, CEO and co-founder, said. In recent years, government organizations nationwide have faced extreme staffing shortages. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics , government employment struggled to return to pre-pandemic levels when private sector employment had already exceeded pre-pandemic levels by the end of 2022. Although public sector jobs have steadily increased since then, it has been increasingly difficult for governments to achieve their innovation needs. Marketplace.city launched in 2017 and has since supported over 200 governments. They work with cities like New Orleans and Los Angeles, counties like Cook County, one of the most populous counties in the nation, and smaller city governments across the country. Their focus has always been to serve governments the best they can, so in 2019 they launched Clearbox Procure, a procurement management service to streamline the technology buying process. In 2022, they also launched Clearbox Source, an annual subscription service providing unlimited access to their proprietary market data and research. With plans to integrate AI into their product suite, Marketplace.city has found the collaborative and flexible arms of Chicago coworking space TeamWorking by TechNexus to be the perfect place to do that. Foreman and his co-founder Andrew Watkins actually started in this space, often meeting at TeamWorking during the early stages of Marketplace.city. They left for a few years, but now they’re back. Foreman said it has felt like a homecoming, and the time away has helped him realiz

By Jim Dallke at TechNexus Venture Collaborative