As a child and a teen, Mike Duffy’s (T’02) interests were highly varied. He built a photography darkroom in his parents’ basement. He spent two summers at journalism camp. He played around on computers, which were just becoming common in households in the ‘90s. 

After he left Purdue, Duffy’s résumé was just as colorful. He joined a family friend’s small fund to boost its technology, thus sparking an interest in macroeconomics. Then came a five-year stint at Northern Trust Global Investments, which included managing mortgage portfolios during the 2008 recession. Next, he obtained his MBA and served as finance chief at a Chicago nanotechnology optics startup.

Finally, in 2013, he found a way to unite his interests in technology, economics, and entrepreneurship: he founded CityBase, a government technology — or govtech — company that completely revamps the websites and other digital services of government and utility clients. These entities typically have sites that aren’t user friendly, with hundreds of web pages that make it difficult for citizens to get their business done.

“CityBase’s first rally cry was ‘Unify the citizen experience,’” Duffy says. “That might mean paving over 30 years of IT decisions. It’s not easy, but it’s important. If people just want to pay their parking tickets, they don’t want to bounce around from the city hall page to the town clerk to a barely usable payments page — they just want to get their business done.”

In stark contrast to the typical digital experience, CityBase’s platform transforms clients’ disparate services and payment processes into the modern age: clear, colorful, and easy to use.

CityBase works with more than 100 clients nationwide, but Duffy says “the fullest expression” of the company’s concept is the site for Indianapolis, Indiana: Indy.gov.

“They allowed us to do what we needed to do, and that meant combing through 3,000 static web pages of sometimes duplicated and dead-end content,” Duffy explains. “We identified 500 services that needed to be digitized — 80 percent of which had a payment process — across 46 different agencies.”

Under CityBase’s platform, one would never know Indy.gov had been so siloed. Now the site features simple directives: Pay your property taxes. Locate household hazardous waste drop-off sites. Request a public record.

“We learned visits to the Indianapolis city-county building have dropped so precipitously that they’re debating selling the building and splitting those services into regional offices,” Duffy says. “The number of property taxes paid online has doubled. It’s really satisfying to see the kind of impact you can create when you give citizens a one-stop shop.”

And more than potential city clients have taken notice. Austin-based GTY Technology, a publicly traded company, bought CityBase for $160 million in a February 2018 deal and joined the startup with five other founder-led govtech firms. 

“It gives CityBase the long-term perspective that comes with being a public entity,” Duffy says. “It’s comforting to know we have that support, and I don’t mind the transparency that comes with it —after all, that’s what we focus on with our clients.”