Today, we are excited to announce Fund V: our newest fund dedicated to supporting innovation and sustainable infrastructure for a stronger democratic future.
Over the past nine years, Higher Ground Labs has played a vital role in building and scaling the modern political technology ecosystem, catalyzing tools behind the highest-impact progressive campaigns and organizations. But the last election cycle revealed clear limits. Even as spending reached record levels, Democratic campaigns struggled to adapt to where voters are and how they engage—limiting their ability to persuade and compete in critical spaces.
Evolving Our Approach
The 2024 election exposed a hard truth: more spending and more outreach no longer guarantee meaningful impact. Rather than a failure of effort, the cycle suggested a failure of fit between existing infrastructure and the realities of today’s media and technology landscape: fragmented attention across hard-to-reach channels, messaging disconnected from community sentiment, and slow or incomplete feedback on what actually shifts voters. That gap is not just tactical, but structural. The progressive ecosystem needs new ways to adapt in real time, operate with better intelligence, and build capacity that persists beyond election cycles.
This breakdown extends beyond campaign performance to the foundations those campaigns rely on. Democracy-enabling technologies strengthen institutions, participation, and information flow. Without them, those systems erode, weakening trust and limiting effective engagement.
Despite these challenges, progressive wins from 2025 and shifting public opinion have opened a window of opportunity heading into 2026. Fund V is designed to support the founders building the platforms needed to harness this momentum.
Fund V Thesis
Fund V is built on a simple premise: if the campaign playbook needs to evolve, the technologies powering it must evolve too. We are investing in three areas that address the most critical gaps in the current ecosystem:
I. Strategic New Bets: Evolving the Campaign Playbook
Enabling fundamentally new approaches to campaigning
- Citizen-Centered Relationship Infrastructure
Systems that support sustained engagement with voters, supporters, and creators over time, not just during campaigns - Community-Led Messaging
Platforms that surface authentic, bottom-up insights from real conversations, replacing top-down assumptions with real-time signals - Underutilized Messenger Networks
Tools that expand reach beyond traditional channels and enable campaigns to compete where voters actually spend time - Creator Systems
Systems that enable campaigns and organizations to engage the creator economy and produce authentic content at scale - AI-Native Campaign Systems
Systems that integrate LLMs and agentic AI to automate workflows, enable real-time adaptation, and scale campaign operations more effectively
II. Civic Tech: Strengthening Democratic Capacity
Building tools that ensure healthy civic and electoral outcomes
- Constituent Communications
Platforms that improve responsiveness, trust, and ongoing engagement between institutions and the public, creating a reliable feedback loop between them - Civics Education
Tools that help people better navigate how government works and advocate to protect rights and preserve civil liberties - Social and Community Health
Technologies that strengthen connection, reduce polarization, and support sustained community-building over time
III. Follow-On Investments: Scaling Core Technology Infrastructure
Expanding scalable platforms, including HGL portfolio and other proven companies
- Advanced CRM Solutions
Platforms capable of powering modern organizing with interoperable data structures that enable more flexible, effective outreach strategies - Advocacy Technology
Tools that convert constituent energy into measurable political influence and action
What’s New in Fund V?
Fund V reflects both a shift in strategy and a more deliberate approach to how we invest and engage with founders. Our priorities throughout the fund include:
AI as Core Campaign Infrastructure
Building with AI as foundational infrastructure, including deploying agentic AI systems to enable real-time adaptation, continuous feedback, and more efficient, scalable campaign and civic operations.
Investing for Measurable Impact
Prioritizing high-demand solutions over incremental or campaign-only tools, making grounded decisions using explicit criteria such as strategic alignment, market timing, and team quality, as well as measures of success like ecosystem adoption and sustained use.
Rolling Investments
A rolling investment model for Fund V allows HGL to fund on founders’ timelines, engage flexibly, and support startups across stages, shifting from broad accelerator cohorts to backing a smaller number of targeted tools aligned with today’s strategic needs and market timing. Our pitch form is now open to submissions year-round.
Why Higher Ground Labs?
Since 2017, HGL has worked to build the political technology landscape that powers progressive campaigns and causes. What’s made that work distinct is how we invest, drawing on startup scaling models from the tech sector while adapting them for the unique needs of the left: community-informed thesis development, early experimentation, extended support from initial pilot through growth, practitioner convenings, and a definition of success rooted in ecosystem adoption and sustained use rather than pure returns.
That approach has produced real results that directly support democracy practitioners: 82 companies across four funds, $42 million in assets under management, $27M+ in campaign cost savings in the 2024 cycle alone, and 22 strategic acquisitions of platforms that enable national scale access for campaigns up and down the ballot. HGL was founded to break the boom-bust cycle of political tech innovation. Fund V deepens that commitment, backing the solutions the ecosystem needs to rise from early experiments to durable infrastructure.
How Do I Get Involved?
If you are a founder building in political tech, civic tech, democratic infrastructure, AI, or related categories, we want to hear from you.
We are already making investments from Fund V, and this year we are offering a continuous rolling investments model. This means founders can engage with HGL year-round through our pitch form and through ongoing conversations with our team. Your company does not need to fit neatly into a single box for us to be interested, but it should directly address a real need, fit in our investment thesis, have a pathway to sustainable growth and revenue, and strengthen the ecosystem in a meaningful way.
👉 Apply here.
Looking Ahead
This work reflects a broader focus for HGL at a sensitive moment for democracy: accelerating the adoption of emerging technologies across the political and civic ecosystem. Our goal is to ensure these tools strengthen the ability of progressive campaigns and organizations to compete and win in an increasingly complex and fast-moving landscape. We will continue advancing this effort through sustained initiatives like our upcoming Agentic AI Open Call (more to come on this soon) and targeted work from the Higher Ground Institute.
We’re thrilled that Fund V will be led by Hillary Lehr, who is returning to Higher Ground Labs following the successful acquisition of the HGL-incubated startup Quiller.ai. Hillary brings two decades of deep experience in the political tech industry, most recently as co-founder and CEO of Quiller, the first-to-market AI content platform for campaigns, and as a Policy Fellow at Harvard Ash Center’s Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation. As a seven-year member of the HGL team, she has been a pivotal part of our story, whose experience grows from many electoral cycles spent scaling political tech partnerships as an early employee at Hustle and Causes.
The next eighteen months will matter enormously for the future of campaigns, institutions, and democracy itself. Fund V is our commitment to backing the founders building the infrastructure that this moment demands. We look forward to working with founders, investors, and partners who are ready to build what comes next.
