GovEagle

I’m beyond excited to announce GovEagle’s $2.5M seed raise from Strategic Cyber Ventures, Y Combinator, Sequoia Scout, and a group of angels! Over the past year, many of the largest and fastest growing GovCons have chosen GovEagle to supercharge their proposal process. Today, our customers are submitting proposals 10x faster while increasing the quality and depth of their responses. Responding to a government RFP is a complex process with no room for error. Which is why, at GovEagle, we don’t believe in replacing humans. Instead, we’re committed to building the process and user experience that allows proposal teams to work with, and be superpowered by, the latest advancements in AI. Today’s funding will help us deliver on this mission while maintaining the best-in-class quality that our customers rely on. The vote of confidence from our investors, partners, customers, and new team members means everything to us. Back to work!

GovEagle Secures $2.5M in Funding from Strategic Cyber Ventures, Y Combinator to Enhance AI-Powered Proposal Platform View Here: https://lnkd.in/emxq55dD GovEagle | Akash M. OrangeSlices AI

Welcome to the team Sanjana Dave!

Welcome to the team Nathan Lui !

GovEagle has rapidly grown these past few months - starting today I want to highlight the people making it possible! Sree Veerapaneni was our first growth hire and has booked $XM in pipeline including three top 10 GovCons 👀 On top of being killer on the phones, Sree has an incredible conference presence. Just last week she ran our AFCEA WEST 2025 booth completely solo (I was down and out with the flu 🤒) Fun Fact: Sree has been making music for years and has hundreds of thousands of listens on Spotify! Pumped to have you on the team Sree!

The GovEagle team just got back from AFCEA International #WEST2025! While there were dozens of things we loved about WEST, here were three of our favorites: 🍻 The Carahsoft reception - nothing like having a drink on top of the USS Midway! 🧪 Innovation Showcase - The team was lucky enough to catch a few glimpses in between booth shifts and they were all amazing. We of course loved anything and everything AI : ) 🤩 And of course, our favorite- chatting with old friends and new about the shifting AI landscape and how to navigate it best as a GovCon Excited to be back next year!

Top 3 things we've heard in a GovEagle demo this week (courtesy of tl;dv - AI Meeting Assistant): 1️⃣ "I smiled because I thought I had been the first one to think of that. And now I'm like, oh, you already built it, and it's already cool." - A company who is considering building their own tool 2️⃣ "You're the first tool I've seen that's built in a way where proposal managers will respond to it and not be afraid of it." - An external proposal consultant with decades of experience 3️⃣ "You guys are the only ones I've seen that have the IT requirements we need to get through CMMC" - A GovCon that recently graduated 8a Now that I've practiced some gratitude...back to the grind 🫡

Here’s my product advice to GovCons building an in-house AI proposal solution: Start with the simplest solution and gradually increase complexity until you’ve met your use case, also known as “the solution ladder”. Here are the steps I'd follow: 🪜1️⃣ :  Start with using Microsoft Copilot connected to your Sharepoint (this works in GCC High as of Feb 2022). This is oftentimes enough to quickly find documents with relevant context. I’d worry about hallucination and exclusion of alternatives. 🪜2️⃣ :  Get sponsorship for claude 3.5 sonnet (available in AWS FedRAMP High) and build your own chatbot solution. This requires the team to build and host their own retrieval system, Sharepoint connector, and user interface. This is a great approach if you want finite control and only need to output excerpts. 🪜3️⃣ :  Combine Rung 2 with an agentic workflow. Using an open-source solution like LangGraph, you can combine outputs from Rung 2 to generate larger proposal chunks. If this is going well, you can try introducing your own document ingestion workflows, experiment with chunking strategies, create new modules, and much more. Any steps I'm missing?

I applied to Y Combinator three different times before finally getting accepted. Here are three things I wish I had known before my first application: 1. Every “co-founder” on the team should be ride or die. My first time applying to YC I had brilliant co-founders but we weren’t ready to take the leap. YC smelled it from a mile away. Quoting the email: "Our challenge is that you all don't seem to be bought in and committed to this idea or at least to working together full-time on a startup. YC cannot be the catalyst for a team to commit to the startup life." 2. Be able to build or sell, ideally both. PG once said that the only jobs of a founder are to build or sell. If you can do one of those, find someone who can do the other. If you can’t do either, focus on building up one of those skills. If you can do both...GovEagle is hiring pls message. Jokes aside, being able to do both is rare and makes you a force to be reckoned with. 3. Have strong opinions that are weakly held. Contrary to popular belief, the idea you start with doesn't matter. Instead, the make-or-break factor is your ability to translate conviction into results. Be open to shifting approaches, invalidating assumptions, and pivoting. There's a reason Einstein said insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

Annual contracts are earned not given. At GovEagle, we’ve taken a contrary approach to our competitors. Instead of starting with any kind of annual commitment, we always start with a pilot period. Why? ⚡ Speed Instead of spending weeks/months walking through demos, we’d rather let our product prove itself with real data and use cases. Offering a low commitment pilot period gives companies the ability to reduce risk and move fast. 🛠️ Customization No GovCon is the same. We’ve found that to get the best results, we need to customize our prompts, data integrations, workflows, and more. With a pilot, we can do this upfront and ensure a longer term engagement goes well. 🔍Customer evaluation Believe it or not, we say no to potential customers after a pilot. Not every team is ready for AI even if they think they are. A pilot allows us to determine if your team has the resources, knowledge, and patience to succeed with AI. Anyone else crazy enough to decline annual contracts in favor of pilots?