Tim Golzer and Curtis Mason have been building things together since high school, when they were co-captains of their school's robotics team. While in college, Golzer and Mason worked with Sean Doherty, whom Mason met while an undergraduate at Boston University, to develop Hang, an app for scheduling hangouts with friends.
Fast forward to 2022, and Golzer and Mason, along with Doherty, felt the entrepreneurial spirit calling again. After considering several ideas, they decided to pursue a largely unaddressed market: tools that help small businesses secure U.S. government contracts.
“In the federal contracting community, we've seen the small business industrial base shrink for most of the past decade,” Dougherty told TechCrunch. “It's hard for these companies to compete with giants like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. It's also expensive to bid on contracts. If they don't win, they could run out of cash. there is.”
Finding and bidding on U.S. federal contracts is a painstaking process, resulting in a maze of systems and mountains of red tape. Dougherty said it will take at least several weeks to complete. And the companies with the best resources are often the most successful.
A 2023 survey by purchase order financing startup SetScale found that small business owners cited lack of cash flow and working capital, as well as lack of time and resources, as the biggest obstacles to securing government contracts. are listed.
To empower these small businesses, Goltser, Mason, and Doherty founded GovDash, a platform that provides workflows to support the government contract acquisition, proposal, development, and management process. GovDash was approved by Y Combinator in 2022. Golzer dropped out of college to take the lead.
GovDash is essentially a contract offer generator. The platform automatically finds contracts that may be relevant to your business, reads requests for proposals, and leverages generative AI to create proposals.
GovDash can search solicitation documents to identify requirements, requested formats, evaluation factors, and contract submission schedules, Dougherty says. Dougherty said he can also identify potential deals for a company to participate in based on past performance and send alerts to the inbox of the customer's choice.
“If a contractor wants to respond to a government request, they can do it through GovDash and create a proposal in a fraction of the time,” Doherty said.
Now, generative AI makes mistakes. That's an established fact. So why would companies expect her GovDash to be any different?
Doherty argues that there are two reasons.
For one, GovDash has built a system that collates a company's information to see how connected that company is to a particular federal contract. If the relevance determined by the system is not clear, GovDash prompts companies to template sections of the contract proposal that include more information.
GovDash's platform seeks to automate many of the tedious aspects of tracking and securing U.S. federal government contracts.
Second, GovDash includes a large amount of human reviews. At each stage of the proposal generation process, the platform checks in with human reviewers to obtain approval.
Doherty acknowledges that these steps – cross-checking and human review – are not foolproof. But he claims it's better than what many of its competitors are doing.
“Companies now have one place where business development data flows seamlessly, with AI agents at the core that automate tedious workflows,” Doherty said. “This is a huge benefit for executives because they can generate more recommendations, at a higher quality level, in less time, and autopilot all associated workflows.”
GovDash competition is growing rapidly.
GovDash competes with Govly, a platform that allows companies to assess, search, and analyze government contract requirements across disparate sources. A recent competitor, Hazel, aims to use AI to automate the discovery, drafting, and compliance of government contracts. Interestingly, like GovDash, both are backed by her Y Combinator.
But Doherty argues that GovDash is well-positioned for expansion.
GovDash, which raised $12 million this month, including a $10 million Series A tranche from investors including Northzone and Y Combinator, will expand its engineering team, guide product efforts, and add new features to its existing platform. We plan to hire an additional federal proposal manager to add to the mix. .
GovDash, which is based in New York and has six employees, currently works with about 30 federal contractors across the country and is “mostly” cash flow positive, Dougherty said.
“We're building a customer base for the long term,” Dougherty said. “[We’re] We are well capitalized for the eventual market tailwinds. ”