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Tim Goltzer and Curtis Mason have been building things together since high school, when the two were co-captains of their school’s robotics team. In college, Goltzer and Mason teamed up to create an app — Hang, to schedule hangouts with friends — with Sean Doherty, whom Mason met when he was an undergraduate at Boston University.
Fast forward to 2022, and Goltzer and Mason — along with Doherty — felt the entrepreneurial urge again. After considering some ideas, they decided to pursue what they saw as a largely unaddressed market: tools to help small businesses secure U.S. government contracts.
“The federal contracting community has seen the small business manufacturing base shrink for much of the last decade,” Doherty told TechCrunch. “It is difficult for these companies to compete against giants like Lockheed Martin or Northrop Grumman. It is also expensive for them to bid on contracts, so if they do not win, they may run out of money.”
As a result of complex regulations and mountains of paperwork, finding and bidding on US federal contracts is a tedious process. It takes at least weeks to complete, according to Doherty — and the better-resourced companies are often the most successful.
In a 2023 survey from Setscale, a purchase order financing startup, small business owners cited insufficient cash flow and working capital — and a lack of time and resources — as the top barriers to securing government contracts.
In an effort to give these small businesses a boost, he founded Goltzer, Mason & Doherty GovdashIt is a platform that provides workflow to support the processes of obtaining, proposing, developing and managing government contracts. GovDash was accepted into Y Combinator in 2022; Goltzer left the college to help drive it.
GovDash is basically a contract proposal builder. The platform automatically finds contracts that may be relevant to the business, reads RFPs, and writes proposals – by leveraging generative AI
Doherty says GovDash can search solicitation documents to determine requirements, required formats, evaluation factors and contract submission schedules. It can also identify contracts for which a company may be eligible based on its past performance, and send alerts to the customer’s inbox of choice, according to Doherty.
“When a contractor wants to respond to a government solicitation, they can run that through GovDash to produce a proposal in a fraction of the time,” Doherty said.
Now, generative AI makes mistakes. It is an established fact. So why should companies expect GovDash to be different?
There are two reasons, says Doherty.
First, GovDash built a system that scans company information to see how relevant a company is to a particular federal contract. If suitability – as judged by the system – is not clear, GovDash requires the company to draft sections of the contract proposal with more information.
The GovDash platform attempts to automate many of the more tedious aspects of pursuing and securing US federal contracts.
Second, GovDash involves extensive human review. At each stage of the proposal creation process, the platform communicates with a human reviewer to obtain a stamp of approval.
Doherty acknowledges that these steps — cross-checking and human review — are not infallible. But he claims they’re better than what a lot of competitors do.
“Companies now have one place where their business development data flows seamlessly, with an AI agent at its core to automate tedious workflows,” Doherty said. “This is a big win for senior executives, as they can deliver more proposals, at a higher quality level, in a fraction of the time, putting all associated workflows on autopilot.”
GovDash’s competition is growing — and fast.
GovDash competes with Govly, whose platform allows companies to assess, research and analyze government contracting requirements across various sources. A more recent competitor, Hazel, aims to use AI to automate the discovery, drafting and compliance of government contracts. Both – like GovDash – are backed by Y Combinator, interestingly.
But Doherty claims GovDash is well-positioned for expansion.
Having raised $12 million from investors including Northzone and Y Combinator, including 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 new capabilities to its existing platform. . .
GovDash, which is headquartered in New York and has six employees, currently works with about 30 federal contractors across the U.S. and has “almost” positive cash flow, Doherty said.
“We are building our customer base for the long term,” Doherty said. “[We’re] Well capitalized to eventually weather market headwinds.
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