John Thomson

Founder & CEO PayIt

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

John Thomson is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of PayIt, a Kansas City-based govtech company that gives residents a single, mobile-first way to transact with state and local government — vehicle registration and DMV services, property tax, court fees, utility bills and licensing. Founded in 2013, PayIt now reaches more than 150 million residents across North America and has raised in excess of $190 million, including a $100 million-plus round from Insight Partners in 2019 and a $90 million growth investment from Macquarie Capital Principal Finance in 2022. The company’s defining premise is that government software has historically been built for the agency rather than the resident, and that the fix is not a better portal but a consumer-grade product with human-centred design, North America-based support, and active adoption work. Thomson is unusually explicit about the local dimension of the ambition: he has said publicly that PayIt can become Kansas City’s next Cerner, both in scale and as a major regional employer.

Career Highlights

• Founded PayIt in Kansas City in 2013 and has been CEO throughout.
• Grew the platform to more than 150 million residents served across North America.
• Raised more than $100 million from Insight Partners in 2019 — at the time a landmark venture investment for a Kansas City company.
• Raised a $90 million growth investment from Macquarie Capital Principal Finance in 2022, in what he described as a difficult capital market.
• Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year, Heartland region, 2020.
• StateScoop 50 Industry Leader of the Year, 2020; PayIt named to the GovTech 100 eight years running.
• Junior Achievement Business Hall of Fame, 2021; Baker University Distinguished Alumnus Award, 2018.
• Board member of the National World War I Museum and Memorial, Autura, and Baker University.

Professional Journey

Thomson graduated from Baker University in Kansas in 1995 and went into technology in Kansas City, where the dominant gravitational body was Cerner Corporation. His entry point was a technical support role — he has said he still keeps the original offer letter — and he has been consistent in describing Cerner as the formative experience of his career, both for the technical grounding and for the demonstration that a company of global scale could be built in Kansas City rather than on a coast. That second lesson turned out to be the more consequential one.

The origin of PayIt is a specific and unglamorous moment in 2013: Thomson needed to renew a vehicle registration, and the state’s website made it far harder than it should have been. His reaction was not that the site was badly built but that the whole model was wrong — that government interactions were designed around agency workflows and budget cycles rather than around the resident trying to complete a task in five minutes on a phone. He founded PayIt that year, with Mike Plunkett as co-founder, to build the resident-facing layer that the public sector had not built for itself.

The product grew outward from payments into the broader transaction. PayIt covers DMV renewals, property tax, court payments, utilities and licensing, unified so that a resident deals with one account and one interface rather than a different system per agency. Several of the company’s deliberate choices are operational rather than technical: support teams based in North America rather than offshore, and dedicated resident communications and customer success functions whose job is adoption — persuading residents to actually use the digital channel, which is where most government digitisation programmes fail.

Capital arrived in two large tranches. In March 2019 Insight Partners invested more than $100 million, a round Thomson framed at the time in ecosystem terms rather than personal ones, arguing that Kansas City needed visible successes and that he had no intention of relocating the company. In 2022, with the venture market sharply tighter, PayIt raised a further $90 million from Macquarie Capital Principal Finance; Thomson called the raise a testament to the business and its growth trajectory given the conditions. By the time of that round the company was around 150 employees and was talking openly about becoming a company of Cerner-like scale in the region.

Recognition followed the growth. Thomson was named Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year for the Heartland region in 2020 and StateScoop 50 Industry Leader of the Year the same year, while PayIt has appeared on the GovTech 100 for eight consecutive years. He was inducted into the Junior Achievement Business Hall of Fame in 2021 and received Baker University’s Distinguished Alumnus Award in 2018. His civic commitments cluster around Kansas City and around his own formation: he sits on the board of the National World War I Museum and Memorial, is a trustee of Baker University where he has helped lead the search for the institution’s next president, serves on the board of Autura, and holds the National Outstanding Eagle Scout Award. He lives in the Kansas City area with his wife Holly, an Emmy award winner, and their daughter Brinklee.

Education

Baker University

Undergraduate, class of 1995