Tim Goltser and Curtis Mason have been constructing things together since highschool, when the 2 were co-captains of their school's robotics team. In college, Goltser and Mason teamed up with Sean Doherty, whom Mason met while attending Boston University, to develop an app, Hang, to plan get-togethers with friends.
In 2022, Goltser and Mason – together with Doherty – felt the entrepreneurial itch again. After considering a number of ideas, they settled on what they saw as a largely unaddressed market: tools that help small businesses secure U.S. government contracts.
“The federal contracting community has seen much of the small business industrial base shrink during the last decade,” Doherty told TechCrunch. “It's hard for these corporations to compete with 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 cash.”
Because of labyrinthine systems and mountains of paperwork, trying to find and bidding for U.S. federal contracts is a laborious process. According to Doherty, it takes not less than weeks to finish – and infrequently the businesses with the perfect resources are essentially the most successful.
In a 2023 survey by Setscalea contract financing startup, small business owners cited inadequate money flow and dealing capital—in addition to an absence of time and resources—as their biggest obstacles to securing government contracts.
To give these small businesses a lift, Goltser, Mason and Doherty founded GovDash, a platform that gives workflows to support government contract acquisition, quoting, development and management processes. GovDash was accepted into Y Combinator in 2022; Goltser dropped out of school to assist out.
GovDash is basically a contract proposal generator. The platform mechanically finds contracts which may be relevant to an organization, reads the RFPs and – using generative AI – creates proposals
GovDash can search tender documents to discover requirements, requested formats, evaluation aspects and contract submission schedules, says Doherty. Doherty says it may well also discover contracts that an organization might qualify for based on its past performance and send notifications to the inbox of the client's selection.
“If a contractor wants to reply to a government RFP, they will run it through GovDash to generate a bid in a fraction of the time,” Doherty said.
Now generative AI makes mistakes. This is a well known fact. So why should corporations expect GovDash to be any different?
Two reasons, argues Doherty.
First, GovDash has developed a system that compares corporations' information to find out how relevant the corporate is to a specific federal contract. If the relevance – as judged by the system – will not be obvious, GovDash will prompt the corporate to create sections of the contract proposal with further information.
GovDash's platform seeks to automate lots of the more tedious features of processing and securing U.S. federal contracts. Photo credit: GovDash
Second, GovDash requires extensive human verification. At each stage of the offer creation process, the platform contacts a human reviewer to receive their seal of approval.
These steps – cross-checking and human verification – are usually not infallible, Doherty admits. But he claims they’re higher than what many competitors are doing.
“Companies now have one place where their business development data flows seamlessly, with an AI agent at the guts to automate tedious workflows,” said Doherty. “This is a large win for senior management as they will submit more, higher quality proposals in a fraction of the time and put all associated workflows on autopilot.”
GovDash’s competition is growing – fast.
GovDash competes with Govly, whose platform allows corporations to evaluate, search and analyze government contract requirements from disparate sources. A more moderen competitor, Hazel, wants to make use of AI to automate the invention, drafting and compliance of presidency contracts. Interestingly, each – in addition to GovDash – are supported by Y Combinator.
However, Doherty maintains that GovDash is well-positioned for expansion.
After raising $12 million this month from investors including Northzone and Y Combinator, including a $10 million Series A funding tranche, GovDash plans to expand its engineering team and hire additional federal proposal managers to guide its product efforts and add latest features to its existing platform.
New York-based GovDash, which has six employees, currently works with about 30 federal contractors across the U.S., Doherty said, and is “near” money flow positive.
“We are constructing our customer base for the long run,” Doherty said. “(We are) well capitalized for any market tailwinds.”
