Govly – Behind the Investment
The US Federal Government is the largest procurer of goods and services in the world, spending nearly $600B annually[1]. With such a massive budget comes a significant operational headache – how can the government find the highest quality and lowest priced opportunities from sellers? Sadly, Amazon isn’t an option.
Instead, they issue Request for Proposals/Quotes/Information (RFPs/RFQs/RFIs; broadly referred to as “RFXs” as a “catch-all” term), which invite businesses to submit their best price and terms for a given product or service. Unfortunately, the government doesn’t make it easy to find these requests, which are spread across myriad federal websites (SAM.gov, eBuy.GSA.gov, SBA.gov, SEWP.NASA.gov, etc.). Public sales teams tasked with hunting down these opportunities need to hop from site to site and manually log into portals that appear to have been last updated in the late 2000s (see below).
Some firms have created significant businesses by scraping these websites and aggregating contract opportunities into a single, searchable view. The problem? Many opportunities are locked inside private contracting avenues, only accessible to certain kinds of vendors called “primes” who have been granted access by the Federal Government to bid on certain types of RFXs. To top it off, collaboration across the complex partner ecosystem of prime contractors and subcontractors is primarily conducted over email, and networking is traditionally dominated by personal relationships inaccessible to many vendors. These manual and time-consuming processes result in significant missed opportunities and lost revenue.
Enter Govly.
Govly’s pioneered a federal procurement platform that automates the sourcing of government contracts, enabling stakeholders to track and share public and private opportunities, collaborate with upstream/downstream partners, and automate the most time-consuming tasks. With Govly, overwhelmed prime contractors can share private opportunities they previously didn’t have the bandwidth to bid with partner subcontractors, and subcontractors get access to contracts they previously didn’t even know existed. This creates a sticky partner ecosystem with network effects at the core.
- “With Govly, I can see things I would otherwise never have known about, and therefore my business is able to capture revenue we would have otherwise not even known to look at. And it’s not an insignificant amount of money I’m talking about.” – F500 Govly Customer
- “Before Govly, we would’ve had to have a full-time department of people, all day every day, skimming through the internet on multiple bid boards to even find an opportunity that met what we need. It’s almost impossible to manually do what Govly does.” – F500 Govly Customer
Govly is mission-critical, delivering significant ROI through net new contract opportunities and time savings:
- “If you tried to take Govly away from me or my team, the business would crash and burn. If it were up to me, Govly would be on mission-critical servers at the tier-one architecture level sitting right beside SAP in our data center.” – F500 Govly Customer
Today, Govly is focused on the Federal IT procurement market, serving Primes, OEMs, VARs, and Distributors, with plans to expand into state, local, and education (SLED) and non-IT opportunities in the future.
Govly first came on our radar way back in 2021 after participating in Y-Combinator, and we quickly recognized that the Govly co-founders (Mike Weiland, Nick Weiland, and Jon Wright) were the right team to build a massive business in the space given their 40+ years of collective federal contracting experience.
We couldn’t be more thrilled to be leading Govly’s $9.5M Series A with participation from Y-Combinator, FCVC, and others. If you’re a public sales team looking to take your procurement game to the next level, be sure to check out Govly!
