"Back in 2022, he ran for city council in a small California town. He lost, but the moment forever changed the way he saw the place - and local governments, for that matter. "I was trying to become a better candidate," he recalled to TechCrunch. "I wanted to understand how my city actually worked, what decisions had been made, why, who said what. And I couldn't figure it out. It's a total black box, and almost intentionally opaque.""
"Since COVID, towns across the nation have started recording and posting their city meetings online. That gave Rajaraman an idea: a company that helped people understand what was happening in local governments. That same year, in 2022, he launched Hamlet to do just that. "We use AI to process thousands of hours of city council and planning commission meeting videos and turn them into intelligence they can actually use," he said."
"At first, he thought it would be a media company, but then real estate developers and political action committees started reaching out. Rajaraman realized that private companies have to deal with local governments, too, and they also want more insight into what is happening in those city council meetings. For enterprise customers, the company helps track agendas and alerts them when relevant topics are addressed across target cities. It also synthesizes what happened after meetings, so they don't have to watch hours-long videos,"
Sunil Rajaraman launched Hamlet after a 2022 city council run exposed opaque local government processes. The company aggregates recorded city meeting videos and applies AI to convert thousands of hours of footage into structured, searchable intelligence. Hamlet positions video-derived insights as more faithful than written minutes and has drawn customers beyond media, including real estate developers and political action committees. For enterprise clients, Hamlet tracks agendas, issues alerts across target cities, synthesizes post-meeting summaries, and provides a searchable archive to find specific mentions or topics. The startup has raised roughly $10 million and aims to scale its civic data platform.
Read at TechCrunch
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