If we’ve learned anything from the budget and reconciliation drama of the past few weeks, it’s that the way money moves around Washington is, like, extraordinarily complicated. Between the congressional infighting, creative allocation maneuvers (looking at you, BBB), and the missing details, things can get confusing real quick.
Well, the good news is, looks like there’s a tool out there that’s trying to sort through the chaos. Yesterday, data intelligence platform Obviant announced they’ve raised $7.1M in seed funding to build out an AI-powered tool that helps users better understand defense spending.
The round was led by Shield Capital, with participation from Motivate Venture Capital, A*, New Vista Capital, Aloft Venture Capital, and Underdog Labs.
“We are solving one of the hardest problems in defense acquisition, which is building a source of truth for the information that powers it,” Brendan Karp, co-founder and CEO of Obviant, told Tectonic.
The funding will be used to double the size of Obviant’s seven-person team and further develop the platform.
In the weeds: Here’s the issue: frankly, the DoD budget is a mess. (Remember the whole thing about an audit?)
Not only is it very long and hard to understand for those outside of the beltway, but critical, nitty-gritty details like program documents, contract details, congressional reports, and budget justification books are spread across thousands of sources.
Obviant is trying to bring all of that information—the information about how the DoD runs and spends its money—under one AI-powered roof.
- Obviants model ingests thousands upon thousands of government procurement and budget documents, then spits out info into a handy-dandy dashboard.
- Users can look up everything from what companies have received which contracts, to how money has been spent on a particular technology, to budget allocations over time, to how Golden Dome will actually be funded.
- Think of it as a one-stop, AI-powered shop to figure out where the Pentagon’s budget is actually going. Karp calls it a “source of truth.”
And investors are pumped about it, too. “We’re excited to lead Obviant’s seed round because it tackles a critical need I’ve seen firsthand in defense acquisition: bringing truth and transparency to government spending,” David Rothzied, a principal at Shield Capital who worked on the deal, told Tectonic.
Bunker buster: Karp showed Tectonic an easy example of how the platform works. As is often the case these days, we kicked things off by talking about Israel and Iran. With just a few clicks, he was able to show us just how much each of the bunker buster MOPs dropped on Iran cost: just over $14M per bomb in FY24.
Figuring this out took all of 30 seconds.
Upgrade ya: Karp said that for now, Obviant will stay laser-focused on defense. In the next few years, he says they’ll work on a three-part expansion plan:
- Expanding data-collection efforts to increase the depth of what’s actually accessible on the platform.
- Enhancing the platform’s AI and machine-learning capabilities to better work with unstructured data and do fun stuff like answer questions and analyze trends.
- Build out discrete workflows for different customer segments—say, commercial, versus government, versus military.
Karp says they plan to go out for another round soon, but, for now, they’re focused on delivering for their customers and expanding quickly.
And, who exactly are those customers? Well, right now, the company is working with users on both the government and commercial sides of things, though Karp was scant with details. What he did say is that their customer base includes everything from defense tech start-ups, to defense primes, to investors, to an “innovation organization” within the government.