Insider Brief
- Ordinal raised $1M seed funding led by Plains Ventures, with support from Winrock International and The Venture Center Arkansas Fund, to expand its AI research assistant built for local governments.
- Its secure RAG-powered platform helps city staff quickly find accurate answers from internal records — such as codes, ordinances, and meeting minutes — linking responses back to verified sources.
- Already live in cities across Arkansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, and California, Ordinal plans to scale nationally, enhance its public-facing chatbot, and add features to help municipalities modernize services and work smarter.
PRESS RELEASE — Ordinal, an AI research assistant for local governments, has secured a $1 million seed round led by Plains Ventures with participation from Winrock International and The Venture Center Arkansas Fund. The funding validates a fast-growing Arkansas team building technology to help cities work smarter.
Ordinal’s platform allows city staff to quickly find answers from verified internal documents, such as codes, ordinances, and meeting minutes, using a secure retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) model. Unlike generic AI tools, Ordinal grounds every answer in the municipality’s own records and links back to the source, ensuring accuracy and consistency.
“Most government employees spend about a third of their work week retrieving information, often navigating multiple sources and even people,” said Jacob Herrington, co-founder of Ordinal. “Ordinal makes that process fast, reliable, and secure. Our goal is simple: help governments and their communities work better together. With this funding, we’re scaling to bring our technology to more cities across the U.S., giving civic servants an easy entry point into AI.”
Founded by Jacob Herrington, Nick Spinazze, and Jacob Eubanks, a team of engineers and product leaders with experience at global technology companies, Ordinal is live and implemented in Sallisaw, Oklahoma; Decatur, Oklahoma; Lowell, Arkansas; Benton County, Arkansas; La Quinta, California; Pea Ridge, Arkansas; and Willard, Missouri, where city staff can search city codes directly through the city website. With the new funding, the company plans to expand its customer base, refine its public-facing chatbot, and build additional features to help local governments work smarter.
The company’s growth has been closely tied to the Northwest Arkansas startup ecosystem. Ordinal is based at Onward HQ in Bentonville, where the team first connected with Plains Ventures during a VC Immersions event hosted by the Northwest Arkansas Council. That network of founders, investors, and support organizations has helped accelerate Ordinal’s progress and positioned the company to scale nationally while remaining anchored in Arkansas.
“Ordinal’s product is intuitive and immediately valuable to governments,” said Matt Hickman, principal partner at Plains Ventures. “Equally important, the founding team has the technical expertise, vision, and ambition to redefine how municipalities operate.”
About Ordinal
Ordinal is an AI-powered research assistant built for local governments. The platform enables staff and residents to retrieve consistent, accurate answers from approved data sources, such as codes, ordinances, minutes, and GIS files, in seconds. By improving access to accurate information while meeting security requirements, Ordinal helps governments modernize services and better serve their communities. Learn more at ordinalforgov.com.
About Plains Ventures
Plains Ventures is a venture capital fund that invests in early-stage companies solving high-value problems. With a proven infrastructure of capital, experience, and network, Plains Ventures helps entrepreneurs succeed and delivers high risk-adjusted returns to its partners. Learn more at plainsvc.com.
Contact Information
Mary Mickel
Managing Partner, Co-Founder at AM Group
mary@amgrouppr.com
501.350.3422
