Tim Goltser and Curtis Mason have been constructing things together since highschool, when the 2 were the co-captains of their school’s robotics team. In college, Goltser and Mason teamed as much as create an app — Hang, for scheduling hangouts with friends — with Sean Doherty, who Mason had met while an undergrad at Boston University.
Fast forward to 2022, and Goltser and Mason — together with Doherty — felt the entrepreneurial itch strike again. After considering just a few ideas, they decided to go after what they saw as a largely unaddressed market: Tools to assist small businesses secure U.S. government contracts.
“The federal contracting community has seen a shrinking of the small business industrial base for much of the past decade,” Doherty told TechCrunch. “It’s hard for these firms to compete against giants like Lockheed Martin or Northrop Grumman. It’s also expensive for them to bid on contracts — in the event that they don’t win, they might run out of money.”
Because of this of labyrinthine systems and mountains of paperwork, finding and bidding for U.S. federal contracts is a laborious process. It takes weeks at a minimum to finish, in keeping with Doherty — and infrequently the best-resourced firms are probably the most successful.
In a 2023 survey from Setscale, a purchase order order financing startup, small business owners cited insufficient money flow and dealing capital — and a scarcity of time and resources — as their top roadblocks to securing government contracts.
To try to offer these small businesses a lift, Goltser, Mason and Doherty founded GovDash, a platform that gives workflows to support government contract capture, proposal, development and management processes. GovDash was accepted to Y Combinator in 2022; Goltser dropped out of faculty to assist spearhead it.
GovDash is basically a contract proposal generator. The platform routinely finds contracts possibly relevant to a business, reads through the requests for proposals and — leveraging generative AI — writes proposals
GovDash can trawl through solicitation documents to discover requirements, requested formats, evaluation aspects and submission schedules for contracts, Doherty says. It might also discover contracts a business is perhaps qualified for based on their past performance, sending alerts to the inbox of a customer’s selecting, in keeping with Doherty.
“When a contractor wants to answer a government solicitation, they will run that through GovDash to provide a proposal in a fraction of the time,” Doherty said.
Now, generative AI makes mistakes. It’s a well-established fact. So why should businesses expect GovDash to be any different?
Two reasons, argues Doherty.
One, GovDash built a system that cross-checks a businesses’ info to see just how relevant the business is to a given federal contract. If the relevancy — as judged by the system — isn’t obvious, GovDash prompts the business to template out sections of the contract proposal with more information.
GovDash’s platform tries to automate most of the more tedious elements of going after — and securing — U.S. federal contracts.
Two, GovDash involves heavy human review. At each stage of the proposal-generating process, the platform checks in with a human reviewer to get their seal of approval.
These steps — cross-checking and human review — aren’t infallible, Doherty admits. But he claims they’re higher than what a whole lot of the competition’s doing.
“Corporations now have one place where their business development data flows seamlessly, with an AI agent at its core to automate tedious workflows,” Doherty said. “It is a huge win for the C-suite as they will get out more proposals, at the next quality level, in a fraction of the time, and put all of the associated workflows on autopilot.”
GovDash’s competition is growing — and quickly.
GovDash competes with Govly, whose platform lets firms assess, search and analyze government contracting requirements across disparate sources. A newer rival, Hazel, goals to make use of AI to automate government contracting discovery, drafting and compliance. Each — like GovDash — are Y Combinator-backed, interestingly.
But Doherty claims that GovDash is positioned well for expansion.
Having raised $12 million from investors including Northzone and Y Combinator, inclusive of a $10 million Series A funding tranche this month, GovDash plans to grow its engineering team, hire additional federal proposal managers to guide its product efforts and add recent capabilities to its existing platform.
Recent York-based, six-employee GovDash currently works with around 30 federal contractors across the U.S., Doherty said, and is “nearly” cash-flow positive.
“We’re constructing for the long run for our customer base,” Doherty said. “[We’re] well-capitalized for eventual market tailwinds.”
