The launch of Hamlet was quite personal for Sunil Rajaraman.

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 thou

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