Higher Ground Labs LLC
08/27/2026 | Press release | Distributed by Public on 08/27/2026 12:08
Announcing HGL’s Agentic AI Open Call Investments
Higher Ground Labs is investing in five companies through our Agentic AI Open Call: Baraza, Context, Haystack, Locunity, and Revere.
Earlier this summer, we launched a first-of-its-kind Agentic AI Open Call to find and fund the best political tech startups building autonomous systems for Democratic campaigns and progressive organizations. Our goal? To deploy agentic AI in the 2026 cycle in ways that produce early learnings for outsized impact in 2028 and beyond.
We received 55 applications. They came from technical founders, campaign veterans, and teams that combined both. Across this highly competitive pool, we saw agents proposed for social and media insights, operational workflows, local governance intelligence, campaign operating systems, and data infrastructure and analytics. That breadth signifies a rapid shift since HGL's generative AI RFP in 2023, when most proposals centered on drafting and summarizing. The volume and quality of the applicants validated what we hoped to learn: builders in this ecosystem are already past the question of whether agentic systems belong in campaign work, and are deep into the harder questions of reliability, oversight, and adoption.
We selected these companies after evaluating each application against the criteria we set out in the open call: deployability in 2026, real user validation, clear guardrails, team strength, and a sustainable business model. We also pressed on what the agents do without a human always in the loop, what happens when something goes wrong, and what accountability looks like if it does. Following our thorough due diligence, these five companies emerged best positioned to tackle the challenge ahead.
The Left cannot afford to sit out advances in AI. These five teams are building the systems that let campaigns close the loop, adapt in real time, and spend their people's time on relationships and judgment. We're betting on them.
The Companies
BarazaFounders: Chandra Chouhan, Aryan Ranjan, Pranav Volety, Rohit Singhal
Baraza is a first-of-its-kind, AI-native political operating system that replaces fragmented tools by consolidating campaign workflows into one affordable, user-friendly platform. From a single dashboard, campaigns manage their CRM, call time, fundraising, volunteers, events, budgeting, and tasks, while AI automates the workflows in between so teams can spend more time engaging voters. Baraza's self-learning world models also simulate how voters form beliefs and make decisions, allowing campaigns to pressure-test strategies and turn predictions into actions. |
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ContextFounder: Nick Richardson Context tracks the political internet every day so campaigns can spot mentions and emerging narratives, see whose content strategies are working, and run battleground research in minutes. It replaces hours of hand-reporting social media metrics and scrolling with real-time research. Context utilizes agentic AI to conduct multi-step research across its expert-curated database of political social media, with built-in safeguards that make sure every answer is data-backed, allowing operatives to finally keep up with the pace of the political internet. scrollcontext.com[email protected] |
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HaystackFounders: Liz Utrup, Nathan Wyeth Haystack equips political communications teams with AI-powered social listening of online voices and key communities from the ground up. It builds tailored social media feeds to uncover hard-to-find content and scale online insights that matter most to your audience, issue, and fight-so you can drive winning messages ahead of the competition. Haystack leverages agentic AI to organize tailored social media feeds by demographic, geography, or interest, allowing teams to spot trends, analyze posts, and surface actionable content for their communication strategies. |
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LocunityFounders: Jonathan Bash, Dev Iyer Local governments make critical decisions on housing, labor, and climate, yet tracking every meeting remains a resource-heavy challenge, putting important public information out of reach. Locunity transforms thousands of hours of public meeting footage and dense agendas into real-time alerts and actionable policy intelligence. Its AI agents work autonomously from your local city hall to the United Nations-identifying opportunities and risks, mapping political coalitions and messaging frameworks, and delivering tailored briefings to advocates, newsrooms, public affairs teams, and campaigns-empowering them to act when it matters most. locunity.com[email protected] |
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RevereFounders: Sascha Meinrath, Chris Goddard, Dan Blah, Stephanie Taylor Revere is an AI agent-powered operational security and resilience platform for civil society. Revere helps organizations identify vulnerabilities, stay ahead of emerging threats, and build stronger, safer systems-including threat assessment and monitoring, secure communications, data and device security, travel security, emergency planning, and more. Revere brings the expertise and tools organizations need to protect their people, their work, and their mission, into one convenient support system. reveresecurity.tech[email protected] |
What's Next
We're leaning into this Agentic AI Open Call as a learning cycle as much as an investment cycle. Over the coming months we will share what these teams find-where agents hold up under campaign conditions, where they break, and what practitioners actually trust them to run. This work will also continue through Higher Ground Institute's Progressive AI Lab, and it will shape what we scale in 2028. We'll be continuing our investments in Fund V into 2027, including in promising agentic tools as we find them.
Interested in working with or supporting these founders? Reach out to [email protected]; we'd love to connect you.
Meet them at our upcoming 2026 Political Tech Showcase on Agentic AI introducing these companies' products, on September 10th 2026. RSVP here.
Higher Ground Labs invests in early-stage companies building political and democracy technology. Join our email list and follow us on LinkedIn to hear what's next.
Higher Ground Labs LLC published this content on August 27, 2026, and is solely responsible for the information contained herein. Distributed via Public Technologies (PUBT), unedited and unaltered, on August 27, 2026 at 18:08 UTC. If you believe the information included in the content is inaccurate or outdated and requires editing or removal, please contact us at [email protected]