Sit around any defense tech conference long enough, and the industry’s main gripe will become abundantly clear: the Pentagon is a byzantine labyrinth, and the government is, well, a pain in the ass to work with.
Turns out one company may have finally found a solution. This morning, software startup Usul—born out of Stanford’s Hacking for Defense course and Y-Combinator—announced a $3.3M seed funding round, led by Scout Ventures with participation from Bravo Victor Venture Capital, to help companies win defense contracts.
The round also included Y-Combinator, as well as private investors (and defense industry insiders) Steve Blank, Peter Newell, Jack Shanahan, and Jacqueline Tame.
Race to automate: The thesis underpinning Usul is pretty simple: Companies should be able to know what funding and contracts are available for the technology they build.
Right now, the ability to score a DoD contract—major or not—often hinges on lobbying dollars, relationships inside the Pentagon, and the program executive officers (PEOs) doling out the defense budget. In other words, it’s an insider’s game.
A perfect match: Usul’s tech is trying to change that. CEO Jarren Reid told Tectonic in an exclusive interview that his company’s software scrapes all of the DoD’s contracts, the defense budget, and all of the different PEOs (and their responsibility areas), then makes contract recommendations for companies using artificial intelligence.
It’s basically a matchmaking service, but for companies and the DoD. The platform:
- Builds company profiles based on tech specs, growth plans, and other company data.
- Uses AI to create an “inbox” of suggested contracts for the company, based on its tech and growth strategy. This is updated daily.
- Also provides direct PEO contacts responsible for those contracts and tech areas, so that companies can make those connections inside of the Pentagon.
“Imagine we want to start a drone company,” Reid said, “[The software] uses AI to find every contract that perfectly matches our drone spec. We also identify all the DoD programs with money to spend on our type of drone, and all of the PEO offices who care about them.”
He called it a “one-stop shop” for companies to win defense contracts.
Money, money, money: So far, Reid said that Usul has helped their clients win over $100M in contracts. Current customers include Firestorm, OneBrief, and Overland AI. He also said that they have demoed the software for primes and that it “went really well.”
“We pretty much have users across every domain of defense right now,” Reid said, “Mainly we’re targeting growth-stage defense companies trying to expand very fast.”
Think big: But Reid is thinking bigger. He said that in the next five years, his company wants to help “build the next 1000 defense primes.”
“Our goal is to be the platform that allows any technology to get in the hands of any allied nation as quickly as possible,” he said.
The company will stay focused on the US DoD through the end of the year, but will expand internationally to NATO and AUKUS customers soon, Reid said. Then, they want to expand into other industries. Defense companies aren’t the only ones selling things to the government, after all.