He Ran City IT. Now He Builds the Software That Runs Cities. | Tom Amburgey, Euna Solutions

He Ran City IT. Now He Builds the Software That Runs Cities.
Most software vendors who sell to government have never worked inside government. They pitch their solutions from the outside looking in, without ever having sat in front of an elected board fighting for a project budget, or answered a call from a frustrated constituent, or been stopped at a grocery store by someone who recognized them from a city council broadcast.
Tom Amburgey has done all of that. Before becoming a govtech CEO, he served as CIO for two Florida municipalities: one affluent and innovation-forward, one urban and resource-constrained. Two very different environments that taught him two very different lessons about what government technology actually needs to do. That dual experience now shapes everything about how he leads Euna Solutions, a North American platform managing hundreds of billions of dollars in public funds on behalf of more than 3,600 government organizations across the United States and Canada.
In Episode 218 of the Localization Fireside Chat, Robin Ayoub and Tom Amburgey go deep on the state of government technology, the broken procurement problem, and why AI is starting to change the equation for both buyers and vendors.
From City Hall to the C-Suite
Tom’s path into govtech started long before he ever sat in a CEO chair. Growing up in a military family, he developed what he describes as a mission-first mindset that eventually drew him toward public service. After years doing software implementations for government agencies, he transitioned into local government itself, serving as CIO at the City of Hallandale Beach and the Village of Wellington in Florida.
What makes his story genuinely unusual is that while he was a CIO, he was actually a customer of two products that Euna now owns: DemandStar, now called Euna OpenBids, and Questica, now called Euna Budget. He never imagined he would one day run the company that built them.
After leaving city hall, Tom moved through CentralSquare Technologies, where he led relationships with more than 3,000 government agencies across North America, before becoming CEO of Civix and then taking the helm at Euna Solutions in July 2023, shortly after the company rebranded from its publicly traded identity as GTY Technology. Today Euna is backed by private equity firm GI Partners and has grown to 12 consolidated products and 700 professionals across the US and Canada.
What Euna Solutions Actually Does
Euna operates across five core product lines: budgeting, procurement, grants, payments, and special education administration. In any given year, nearly $600 billion in public funds flows through Euna Budget. Close to $100 billion moves through Euna’s procurement systems. Grants processed through the platform are approaching $600 billion as well.
Those numbers are not just impressive statistics. They represent schools, roads, emergency services, and community infrastructure that most people interact with every day without ever thinking about the software behind it.
Tom frames the company’s purpose around a simple idea: Euna exists to build trust and enable transparency in communities. That means giving governments tools to publish their budgets openly, run competitive procurement processes, manage grants responsibly, and collect payments simply. When Robin asked Tom to paint a picture of what a community looks like when Euna is running well, Tom described cleaner workflows, better data for decision-making, and a public that can actually see where its tax dollars are going.
The Canada Question
Euna is dual-headquartered in Atlanta and Oakville, Ontario, just a few minutes from Robin’s base in Mississauga. The Canadian public sector footprint is real, and the conversation naturally turned to how Canadian and American government buyers differ.
Tom’s honest answer: not as much as you might expect at the municipal level. Both require fund accounting, budget approvals, RFP processes, and payment systems. The main structural difference is that US municipalities rely more heavily on federal grants as a funding mechanism than their Canadian counterparts do.
Where Canada does diverge significantly is Quebec. Euna does not operate in Quebec. The combination of French-language requirements under Bill 96, different legal structures, and software localization complexity has led Euna to focus its Canadian operations on the rest of the country, where bilingual requirements are less stringent at the municipal level.
The Broken Procurement Problem
This is the segment of the conversation that will resonate most with anyone who has ever submitted a bid to a government agency.
Euna’s own research found that the average RFP project takes nearly 90 hours to complete, and yet 62 percent of agencies receive only two to five bids in response. Robin shared a story from his own experience in the language services industry: a recent government RFP for translation services that included a requirement for translators to wear hard hats. Tom countered with his own version: software contracts that still require surety bonds and completion bonds, even though there is no physical infrastructure involved.
The root cause, according to Tom, is a combination of stretched procurement staff, outdated templates that nobody has time to update, and limited visibility into the supplier network. One person managing 15 RFPs in a budget year simply does not have 90 hours to spend on each one.
Euna’s answer to this is Solicitation Advisor, an AI tool launched in late April 2026 that reviews draft RFPs before they go public. It flags vague instructions, conflicting criteria, and requirements that do not match the category of service being procured. The next iteration, currently in testing with select customers, goes further: it does not just flag problems, it makes specific recommendations for how to fix them. The goal is a cleaner, more competitive solicitation that attracts more qualified vendors and produces better outcomes for communities.
AI in Government: Reality Behind the Hype
Euna won the 2025 AWS Champions Award for AI Innovation in Public Sector Procurement. At the same time, Euna’s own State of AI in the Public Sector research found that readiness among government buyers is low. Tom does not see a contradiction there.
His philosophy is AI at the right pace, the right way. Euna’s approach is to use AI as a tool that augments human work, not replaces it. Every AI feature can be turned on or off. Everything has a human in the loop. The company uses the same AI tools internally that it ships to customers, so it can speak from genuine experience rather than vendor positioning.
On data sovereignty and residency, Tom was candid. Euna stores Canadian customer data in Canada through AWS and Azure Canadian infrastructure. However, the language models the company uses, from Anthropic and OpenAI, are US-based. For customers who are comfortable with data transiting to the US for computation and returning without being stored, Euna’s AI features are available. For those with stricter requirements, those features are not yet enabled. It is a transparency-first approach that most of Euna’s Canadian customers have found acceptable so far.
What Vendors Need to Know About Selling to Government
One of the most valuable segments of the conversation was Tom’s direct advice for companies that sell to government, including the translation agencies, language service providers, and localization vendors who make up a significant part of the LFC audience.
The most common mistake vendors make is assuming that government always buys the lowest price. Tom was clear: there is no law requiring government to buy the cheapest option. Euna itself wins 80 percent of its deals without being the lowest price. What matters is demonstrated value, partnership quality, and ROI. Vendors who race to the bottom are leaving money and credibility on the table.
The second mistake is asking government buyers to break their process. Every request to skip a step, bypass a procurement stage, or get an unofficial answer puts the government employee in a difficult position. Understanding the process, respecting it, and building relationships within it is far more effective than trying to work around it.
A Message to Public Servants
Tom closed with a direct message to the public servants who might be listening: if you are struggling through old software, spreadsheets, or tools that make your job harder than it needs to be, reach out. The govtech community has enough room for everyone to succeed, and the goal of every good vendor in this space should be to make the work of public service easier, so that the people doing it can focus on what actually matters to the communities they serve.
Listen to the full conversation here: https://localization-fireside-chat.simplecast.com/episodes/he-ran-city-it-now-he-builds-the-software-that-runs-cities-tom-amburgey-euna-solutions | Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/slwlNbfbNRI | Connect with Tom Amburgey: https://www.linkedin.com/in/twamburgey/ | Connect with Robin Ayoub: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robinayoub | Visit N49Networks: https://www.n49networks.com | Book a call with Robin: https://calendly.com/robin-ayoub/30min