This is going to be a retrospective newsletter.

We're getting a jump on the year-in-review because a month from now is the week before Christmas. By that time, we'll all be done reading (and I'll be done writing) newsletters in 2025!

The next few weeks for us are a sprint:

• Ambitious coverage expansion
• First month of record request automations
• Prep for the big twice-yearly Shovels Summit
• Turkey, etc
• Turning the last contract redlines into signatures
• All on top of the regular day-to-day

And this, of course, has me thinking.

We had a kick-ass 2025. The whole team is proud, our investors are pleased, our customers are happy, and we go into 2026 fired up and ready to go.

In this newsletter I'll tell you why.

But first…

If you're in San Francisco on December 4, you really should join us at Cigar Bar between 5-7:30pm. RSVP here!

Okay, here's what happened in 2025

We doubled our coverage

We started the year with a bit over 1,000 jurisdictions. We'll end this year with over 2,000 of them.

This puts us well into the top tier of industry coverage. By the summer of 2026 we will be the undisputed heavyweight champions of permit data. The Greatest Of All Time. The most data with the best software and the friendliest support.

We did this through the hard work of our engineering squad: Luka, Petra, Dragan, Bozidar, and Filip. It's been a tremendous effort, and it feels like we're only getting started.

By the end of next year we'll double our coverage again.

We tripled our revenue

People tell me they like that I'm building in public. I don't think that's what I'm doing.

There are meaningful milestones that I want to celebrate publicly and I want the team to see your reaction. So I'll post, even at the risk of oversharing, because I think it's worth it. But the goal is not for the whole world to know everything.

So I'll just say this. One year ago, our monthly recurring revenue was one third what it is today. And it wasn't bad back then.

Tripling revenue gracefully is hard. I think we accomplished this because we have an incredible team, but the one person most responsible is Betty. If you've signed a deal with us, you know her well.

Will we triple revenue again in 2026? That's the plan! We're setting ourselves up for it every day.

We went offline (in a good way)

I wrote a lot about Wolverine and Storm last month (check the newsletters section of our blog). All the other permit data companies have some (vastly inferior 😉) version of Wolverine (online data via web scraping). I'm not sure that any of them have Storm (offline data via public records requests).

Storm is so key. I can't emphasize it enough. And it's so obvious too, which is why I keep writing about it. If you're a government data company, knowing that Storm should happen is easy, but actually executing on it is hard. It's overwhelming. It's annoying. It's everything you don't expect in a tech startup.

That's why I love it.

We have an amazing team running Storm. Chloe and Tori are making fast, fast, fast progress. The rest of the company, including me, are just trying to keep up. We're finding clever ways to research and automate the public record requests process. It's frustrating to figure out and it's exhilarating to break through.

This kind of DNA is core to Shovels and will play a huge role in 2026.

We started SOC 2

It's nobody's idea of a good time, but our biggest prospects are asking for it, and many deals won't move until we have it. So here we go.

We're actually in the SOC 2 audit window now. Not to jinx anything, but I'm expecting we'll have our report in February 2026 and then we can affix that badge onto our contracts and have the goods to back up our security assurances.

As far as I know, we'll be the only SOC 2-compliant permit data company in the market. We've always taken security seriously, but this process made us even more aware and confirmed that we are following all of the best practices.

We got really into mapping

The geospatial data community supported us from day one. I think there was a lot of pent-up demand for seeing permits on maps.

Esri, the biggest geospatial data and software company in the world, has been especially supportive of our mission to make government data more accessible. We joined their startup partner program and attended their conferences.

We set up our own ArcGIS Enterprise server and helped some of the largest companies in the world see permits on maps. Through all of this, we learned a lot about what a good map means to Esri: it's clean, accurate, easy to understand, and helpful.

Esri screens for this, and maps that meet their high standards get accepted into the Living Atlas. Just recently, two of our maps got in.

Here's our Living Atlas map of construction permits in Los Angeles county between June and August 2025.

Check it out! It's open to the public.

Next year we'll add maps to our apps (that's fun to say) and pretty much everywhere else. I see no end to our interest in geospatial data.

We wrote some great content

We have been ripping on our content production since Morgan joined in July. Here are three of his greatest hits:

• Q2 Permit Index: Surging electrical permits, dominant sunbelt construction, and unexpectedly strong new-building growth in overlooked states.
• ADU Report: Explosive, policy-driven growth in California and coastal states, plus surprising Sun Belt adoption as organic housing relief.
• Hurricane Report: Harvey's slow, flood-driven rebuild versus Ian's rapid, roof-focused recovery, revealing distinct "disaster signatures" in permits.

These are loooong pieces that required a ton of effort to write. It's real work, involving original research into our own immense database. It feels very natural for us to take it on, even though it takes time, because it helps us appreciate our data.

For projects like these, we are our own customer. You'll see a lot more of them next year!

We updated our tagline

We started this year with a homepage that spoke to our original value proposition: to help companies sell products and services to contractors. We still do this, but it's not all we do, and it's not why our biggest customers signed up.

This new tagline more accurately describes what we offer:

"The intelligence layer for the built world."

Much of 2025 was building this foundation. All of 2026 will be expanding on it.

Things to do with permits: launch new products

Oh, we have a bunch of goodies in store for you. In addition to the current product expansion I described above, we'll launch:

A new data type

We've actually been more than just permits for a while now. Since 2023 we've been collecting contractor license files from states and other jurisdictions and merging this info into our permit-based contractor data.

In 2026 we will launch a new construction data type. It will play nicely with permits, but it will not be a permit. It will come from similar sources, but it will require some new Wolverine technology and some more Storm outreach.

I'll have more to say on this in Q1!

A new API version

We've been on V2 for a year already, and we know where the soft spots are. To fulfill our tagline, we need to upgrade to V3. This new API version will allow for expanded data modeling and to serve a wider range of data types.

A few of the implications are:

• The jurisdiction API I've been posting about
• Multiple contractors per permit
• Profiles of all addresses and contractors, not just those with permits

This is a big one!

A new AI interface

We've been talking about "Chuck" for a while. When we launch (soon!) it will have a new name and some killer new features that we couldn't do within Claude Desktop.

This product will be accessible directly through the browser and have all of the power of Shovels Online (CSV exports!) combined with the flexibility of the new AI chat modality. We're battle-testing it internally now and squashing all the bugs.

It's just a few weeks away from being ready for all. SUPER excited about this one.

From ours to yours, enjoy the 2025 holidays and we'll see you in 2026!