At Norwest, we’re excited to announce our strategic growth investment in PSD Citywide, a Canadian software company transforming how municipalities manage, maintain, permit, plan and budget for the critical infrastructure needed by the communities they serve.
Public works, parks & recreation, utilities and other municipal departments face the growing challenge of managing portfolios of aging assets while dealing with budget constraints, inefficient processes and disconnected technologies. PSD’s unified platform helps municipalities solve these issues — transforming offline or outdated processes into connected digital workflows which allow for a better citizen experience.
Investing often means spotting innovation where others see routine. For us, PSD Citywide represents exactly that kind of opportunity: a deeply respected, founder-led company that has quietly built one of North America’s leading enterprise asset management software platforms and is now ready to scale that success.
A 15-Year Overnight Success
PSD Citywide’s story began nearly two decades ago as Public Sector Digest, a trade publication and advisory business helping municipalities with asset management and capital planning. Father-son founding team Tom Dawe, President, and Matt Dawe, CEO, were advising cities on how to tackle real infrastructure challenges. That expertise became the foundation for everything PSD is today.
As their advisory work deepened, the Dawes recognized a prevalent pain point: local governments lacked a modern, integrated system to track assets, manage maintenance, and budget for future infrastructure projects. So, they built one.
Leveraging their expertise to develop a cloud-native platform purpose-built for the public sector, the father-son team swiftly entered the municipal software market. Today, PSD Citywide’s comprehensive suite combines asset management, maintenance management, GIS, budgeting, citizen engagement and permitting in one unified system.
PSD Citywide has helped communities manage over $400 billion in municipal assets, providing the digital infrastructure they need to plan smarter and work more efficiently. Its growth has been steady, deliberate, and deeply customer-focused; all qualities that resonate with how we at Norwest view enduring businesses.
PSD Citywide is what we like to call a “15-year overnight success” — a business forged from true industry expertise and refined over time through a deep understanding of customer pain points and trust built with its customers.
A Platform Purpose-Built for the Public Sector
PSD Citywide’s modular platform – combined with its advisory services and superior customer support – is designed to meet the unique needs of a variety of communities, including local governments, utilities, colleges and universities, facilities and conservation areas and parks. The five modules that improve operations and the citizen experience include:
- Asset Management: Provides a single place to develop lifecycle and risk models, track condition assessments, and plan capital improvements.
- Maintenance: Enables more efficient handling of service requests, work orders, preventative maintenance, and inspections across every department, both in the office and in the field.
- GIS: Offers the full functionality of an enterprise geographic information system (GIS), it can easily highlight your infrastructure based on risk, asset condition, probability of failure, and other factors, and integrate data from other systems.
- Permitting, Planning, and Licensing: Improves document management while allowing the public to easily submit applications, receive real-time status updates, and pay online.
- Budgeting and Planning: Enables efficient creation of single or multi-year operational budgets, with ability to build forecasts and evaluate performance while supporting role-based security, workflow management, version control, and audit tracking.
Expanding Reach into an Attractive Mid-Sized Municipal Market
PSD Citywide is already a market leader in Canada, serving hundreds of municipalities nationwide. Its success has come from meeting the unique regulatory and operational needs of local governments and delivering consistently high-quality products and services.
Now, the company is accelerating its expansion into the U.S., where many small-and-midsized municipalities rely on manual systems or outdated tools. We estimate up to half of small-to-midsized U.S. municipalities operate without a modern, purpose-built solution today.
Strong traction and clear market opportunity position PSD Citywide to capture a meaningful share of the addressable market across Canada and the U.S. PSD’s recent growth in this market — already counting dozens of U.S. customers including cities like San Rafael, California — validates the need for a modern, cloud-native solution and the significant opportunity that lies ahead.
Looking Ahead to the Next Chapter
We’ve long admired the grit and ingenuity of bootstrapped, founder-led businesses and PSD Citywide exemplifies that ethos. It takes a special type of focus and determination to evolve your business from a trade publication to an advisory business and then use the internally generated cash flows (as well as deep industry expertise) to develop and market a leading software platform. From our first meeting with CEO Matt Dawe, we knew this was a team we wanted to back.
As Tom steps into retirement, Matt and his leadership team, including CFO Rob Henderson, and CTO Pete Scott, are doubling down on the company’s mission: helping municipalities and their residents thrive. Norwest’s investment will support this transition and accelerate growth through executive recruiting, U.S. expansion, and continued product innovation.
Reflecting on this next phase, CEO Matt Dawe shared, “We welcome Norwest’s deep expertise in government technology and their proven ability to partner with founder-led companies as we prepare for rapid expansion across the U.S. and Canada.”
“We welcome Norwest’s deep expertise in government technology and their proven ability to partner with founder-led companies as we prepare for rapid expansion across the U.S. and Canada.” — Matt Dawe, CEO, PSD Citywide
This partnership marks our sixth Canadian software investment and our sixth in the state and local software market, building on our experience with companies like SpryPoint, Vector Solutions, Envisage Technologies, Turnitin, and Appriss.
We’re proud to partner with PSD Citywide on this journey – and excited to see how the company continues to shape the future of municipal technology across North America.
