FiscalNote: The Washington Technology Company That Put Policy Intelligence and CQ Roll Call Under One Roof

FiscalNote is a policy and market intelligence company headquartered in Washington, District of Columbia, whose software and news brands help organizations track legislation, regulation and political risk around the world. Through its flagship PolicyNote platform and a family of brands that includes CQ, Roll Call and VoterVoice, FiscalNote sells something every large organization in a regulated industry needs: advance knowledge of what governments are about to do, and the tools to respond. Its website is fiscalnote.com.

FiscalNote sits at the meeting point of several kinds of media business. It is a software-as-a-service technology company, a data provider and — through CQ and Roll Call, two of the most established names in Capitol Hill journalism — a news publisher. That combination, assembled since its founding in 2013, makes it one of the defining Washington information companies of its generation.

Overview

The company describes itself as a leading technology provider of global policy and market intelligence, combining proprietary artificial intelligence technology, comprehensive data and decades of trusted analysis. Its customers use FiscalNote products to monitor bills and regulations, manage stakeholder relationships, mount grassroots advocacy campaigns and assess geopolitical and market risk. The company serves thousands of customers worldwide, with offices across North America, Europe, Asia and Australia.

Its brand family tells the story of its construction. PolicyNote is the flagship technology platform. CQ provides legislative tracking and analysis of the U.S. Congress, and Roll Call is the Capitol Hill newspaper founded in the newspaper tradition of covering Congress as a journal of record. VoterVoice is its grassroots advocacy platform. FrontierView and Oxford Analytica have supplied market and geopolitical intelligence. Each brand was a leader in its niche before joining the group.

History and Founding

FiscalNote was founded on June 11, 2013, by Tim Hwang together with Gerald Yao and Jonathan Chen. Hwang, a Princeton student at the time of the company's beginnings, became its chairman and chief executive; the founding idea was to apply modern software and machine learning to a problem that had traditionally been handled by clipping services, printed directories and personal relationships — knowing what legislatures and regulators were doing, early enough to act on it.

The company grew quickly in Washington's government-affairs economy, raising venture backing — billionaire Mark Cuban was among its early backers — and building a platform that aggregated legislative and regulatory data from jurisdictions in the United States and, increasingly, around the world. From the start it positioned technology, not journalism, as the core product: the data feeds, alerts and workflow tools that government-relations professionals use daily.

The CQ Roll Call Acquisition

The defining move in FiscalNote's history came in 2018, when it acquired CQ Roll Call from the Economist Group in a deal valued at 180 million dollars. The Economist Group retained an 18 percent equity stake in FiscalNote, becoming its largest single shareholder, and Economist Group chief executive Chris Stibbs joined the FiscalNote board. Founder Tim Hwang remained the largest individual shareholder and chief executive.

The logic of the deal was the logic of the whole company: CQ Roll Call brought unmatched editorial expertise and Capitol Hill authority — Congressional Quarterly's decades of legislative data and journalism, and Roll Call's newsroom — while FiscalNote brought technology and analytics that could be layered over that content. As the parties put it at the time, the opportunity was to combine data, technology and insight with editorial expertise to create something neither company had alone.

Ownership and Public Listing

In November 2021 FiscalNote announced it would go public through a merger with Duddell Street Acquisition Corp., a special-purpose acquisition company, in a transaction valuing the company at about 1.3 billion dollars and expected to provide roughly 275 million dollars in proceeds, including a 100 million dollar private placement. The company became publicly listed on the New York Stock Exchange on August 1, 2022, under the ticker symbol NOTE. The listing made Hwang, then 29 at the deal's announcement, one of the youngest Asian American founder-chief executives on a major U.S. stock exchange.

In August 2023, Hwang and co-founder Gerald Yao rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange to mark both the company's tenth anniversary and its first year as a public company — an occasion the company used to note its addition to the Russell 3000 Index, new AI partnerships and a series of strategic acquisitions.

Leadership

Tim Hwang led FiscalNote as chairman, chief executive and co-founder through its first decade, becoming the public face of the company. Gerald Yao, a co-founder, has held senior strategy and leadership roles. In the company's more recent releases, Josh Resnik — who served as president and chief operating officer — is identified as chief executive officer and president, quoted announcing customer wins and product launches for the PolicyNote platform. The leadership transition reflects the company's evolution from venture-backed startup to an operating public company focused on its flagship platform.

Services and Products

PolicyNote, the flagship platform, lets government-affairs teams track legislation and regulation across jurisdictions, receive alerts, collaborate on shared dashboards and generate reports. The company has described global coverage spanning more than 80 countries' national governments and transnational bodies, including bills, amendments, votes, enactments, proposed and enacted regulations, hearings and consultations, supplemented by human policy analysis.

CQ supplies the deep U.S. congressional product: bill tracking, committee coverage, transcripts, votes and analysis built on Congressional Quarterly's decades of methodical documentation of Congress. Roll Call publishes news and analysis of Congress and elections for a public and professional audience. VoterVoice provides grassroots advocacy infrastructure — the tools organizations use to mobilize supporters to contact elected officials — powering millions of advocacy interactions annually, from email and phone campaigns to in-person fly-in events. FrontierView and Oxford Analytica have extended the group into frontier-market and geopolitical risk analysis for multinational clients.

Clients and Coverage Areas

FiscalNote's customer base spans the private, public and nonprofit sectors. Companies named in its announcements over the years include major corporations such as 3M, AstraZeneca, Blackstone, FedEx, HP Inc., McKesson, Microsoft, Netflix, Teladoc Health, Tesla and Uber, and its government clients have included institutions such as the White House, Congress, the U.S. Supreme Court, the Department of Defense, the Federal Reserve and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. At points in its growth the company reported more than 5,000 customers worldwide.

Geographically, the company's coverage mirrors its clients' exposure: U.S. federal and state government first, then the European Union and national governments across Europe, Asia and Australia, tracked from offices on four continents. The subject coverage is whatever governments regulate — healthcare, energy, technology, financial services, trade and emerging fields its founders singled out early, from cryptocurrencies and the gig economy to electric vehicles, sports betting and ESG.

Digital Platforms and AI

Artificial intelligence is the company's founding claim and its continuing pitch. FiscalNote has long used machine learning and natural language processing to collect and analyze legislative, regulatory and geopolitical data, and it moved early to build generative-AI products, announcing partnerships with leading AI firms and products such as FiscalNoteGPT and its Risk Connector. For the 2024 U.S. presidential campaign, Roll Call integrated Factba.se — the database of presidential statements — with AI-driven real-time analysis of campaign speeches, an example of the group's strategy of fusing its news brands with its data technology.

More recently, the company has pushed PolicyNote's developer-facing capabilities, adding VoterVoice's district-matching data to the PolicyNote API so advocacy organizations can reliably connect constituents to the correct legislators — the unglamorous data plumbing on which effective civic engagement depends.

Recent Developments

FiscalNote's recent announcements emphasize continued adoption of PolicyNote by large enterprises across sectors including medical devices, construction, logistics, utilities and consumer products, with chief executive Josh Resnik presenting the platform as the company's center of gravity. The trajectory — from a 2013 startup selling legislative tracking, through the purchase of Washington's most storied congressional news organization, to a public company organizing itself around a single AI-driven policy platform — captures a broader shift in the information business: in policy media, the durable value lies less in any single article than in the data, workflow and intelligence wrapped around the news.