(Ordinal)
Ordinal, an AI research assistant for local governments based in Bentonville, has secured a $1 million seed round led by Plains Ventures of Oklahoma City with participation from Winrock International and The Venture Center Arkansas Fund.
Ordinal’s platform allows city staff to find answers from verified internal documents, such as codes, ordinances and meeting minutes, using a secure retrieval-augmented generation model. Unlike other AI tools, Ordinal checks every answer in the municipality’s own records and links back to the source, aiming to ensure accuracy and consistency.
“Most government employees spend about a third of their work week retrieving information, often navigating multiple sources and even people,” Jacob Herrington, co-founder of Ordinal, said in a press release. “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 United States, giving civic servants an easy entry point into AI.”
Founded by Herrington, Nick Spinazze and Jacob Eubanks, Ordinal is implemented in Lowell, Benton County, Pea Ridge; Sallisaw and Decatur, Oklahoma; Willard, Missouri; and La Quinta, California, where city staff can already search 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.
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.
“Ordinal’s product is intuitive and immediately valuable to governments,” Matt Hickman, principal partner at Plains Ventures, said in the release. “Equally important, the founding team has the technical expertise, vision, and ambition to redefine how municipalities operate.”
