His launch Hamlet it was very 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 be a better candidate,” he recalled to TechCrunch. “I wanted to understand how my city actually worked, what decisions were made, why, who said what. And I couldn’t figure it out. It’s a total black box and almost deliberately opaque.”
Since COVID, cities across the country have begun recording and posting their town meetings online. That gave Rajaraman an idea: a company that helped people understand what was happening in local governments. That same year, 2022, he launched Hamlet to do just that.
“We’re using artificial intelligence to process thousands of hours of video of city council and planning commission meetings and turn it into intelligence they can actually use,” he said. He said these videos are better than meeting minutes because these documents are simply someone’s interpretation of what happened. “The video doesn’t lie.”
At first, he thought it would be a media company, but then real estate developers and political action committees started reaching out. Rajaraman realized that private companies need to engage with local governments, too, and they also want more insight into what’s going on at those city council meetings.
For corporate clients, the company helps monitor agendas and alerts them when relevant issues are being considered in target cities. It also synthesizes what happened after meetings so they don’t have to watch hours of video, and allows them to search the video archive to see, for example, when and how a competitor was mentioned in a local government setting.
Techcrunch event
San Francisco
|
13-15 October 2026
Hamlet has raised approximately $10 million in venture funding to date, from backers including Slow Ventures, Crosslink Capital, Banana Capital and Kapor Capital. “We want to be the ‘Bloomberg’ of this space, so to speak,” Rajaraman said.
On Friday, Rajaraman announced that he is expanding the company to launch Hamlet TV as a way to help ordinary citizens stay informed about what is happening in their governments. Streaming channel is on TikTok, youtube, AppleTV and Instagramand will highlight highlights from board, committee and school board meetings.
Rajaraman said his company has edited thousands of hours of government meetings for government clients.
“We’ve seen meetings that have gone 15-plus hours without a break,” he said. He and his team started curating funny moments from these meetings and thought it was a good idea to use humor to get people more invested in US democracy. “If you show people procedural videos, they just won’t care. But if you show them the funny stuff, they will.”
The most amazing thing he and his team have seen on Hamlet TV so far was someone dressing up as a cockroach to address the council about a pest problem. But it’s not the funny stuff that surprises him, he said. “It’s how important these meetings are and how invisible they remain.”
He cited an example from earlier this year, when the Tucson City Council rejected Amazon’s $3.6 billion data center. He said the decision came after months of planning, but only a few people likely watched those videos to understand why it happened.
This is not the first time Rajaraman has run a business — or a media outlet. Co-founder of analytics platform Scripted and twice Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Foundation Capital. He also ran a publication called The Bold Italic and later sold it to Medium.
He knows that Hamlet TV probably won’t be profitable and reiterated that he is doing this to get people more involved with the state of the country’s democracy. He also plans to give away the Hamlet tool to local journalists for free. “Data is great, but context matters so much,” he said.
Hamlet is then looking to work with government affairs, advocacy organizations and renewable energy developers. “Democracy works best when people are watching,” he said. “We’re trying to make tracking possible.”
