Eric Schmidt-backed data science startup Civis Analytics, born out of Obama's re-election campaign, raises $22M Series A led by Drive Capital
Civis Analytics, a company founded by the chief analytics officer of Barack Obama's 2012 re-election campaign, has raised $22 million in Series A funding.
Context & Ripple Effects
This round lands mid-way through a 2015–2016 wave of civic-data venture funding: OpenGov had just raised $25M with Marc Andreessen joining its board ($25M civic tech round), and Eric Schmidt was already bankrolling political tech through The Groundwork, which became a major vendor to Hillary Clinton's campaign. Civis itself had surfaced months earlier when Wired reported it was using its Obama-campaign-built databases to prop up polling as traditional methods faltered.
The through-line is Schmidt as a repeat patron of election-adjacent data infrastructure — a pattern that extends past this raise into his 2020 push alongside Hoffman, Moskovitz, and Powell Jobs to boost Biden. The $22M from Drive Capital converts a campaign artifact into a standing company.
First-order effects
- Civis Analytics gets $22M in Series A capital led by Drive Capital, letting it scale the database-driven targeting operation it had already deployed against unreliable traditional polling.
Second-order effects
- Drive Capital takes a position in a category where Schmidt-backed money is already active on the Democratic side via The Groundwork, concentrating elite tech capital around campaign data vendors.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, campaign analytics stops being a cyclical hiring surge every four years and becomes a permanent, venture-funded industry sitting between parties and their voters — with funders like Schmidt gaining durable influence over electoral data capacity.
The trend: Wealthy technologists are financing a standing data-analytics layer around US elections, turning wartime campaign tools into always-on companies.