NoVa startup GovForce raised $2.5M to help government contractors

To the sweet tune of $2.5 million, a new startup in the local government contracting sphere moved out of stealth.

GovForce, a remote company from founders in Northern Virginia, launched Tuesday with the announcement of a $2.5 million seed round led by QED Investors and Humba Ventures. Cambrian and NextGen Venture Partners also took part in the round, which will subsidize building out the startup’s government contracting connection platform. The company was founded in August 2022.

Brendon DiBella, cofounder and head of growth for GovForce, said that he, Jason Mitchell and CEO Tonio DeSorrento (whose wife, Amelia, you might know from startup Hatch), set out to build a company after hearing the experiences of many friends, family and neighbors who were government contractors. Often, these contractors were encountering many of the same issues owing to issues collaborating, as small businesses, with such a massive client as the federal government. Many contracts require the work of multiple companies, yet many of these contractors struggle to communicate and share data and reports.

DiBella added that once companies are in contract with each other, through such vehicles as a subcontracting agreement, they need to share details such as insurance and the company’s organizational structure, which can be sensitive.

“That data does not have a place to live every day,” DiBella told Technical.ly. “It’s often handled in email, on a spreadsheet and in different forms.”

GovForce is looking to solve what DiBella calls the last mile — the home for that shared information. GovForce’s platform is designed to host the everyday business of a government contractor, ranging from sending reports and handling important contract requirements to sharing data. Using cloud storage, the platform will tie together accounting systems, enterprise resources planning and other software used on the day-to-day.

Dibella said that GovForce will be a SaaS offering that, because of its base in cloud storage, will thus not be locally installed. While the emphasis will lie on a vault storage system, contractors will also have access to a dashboard with contract statuses and the ability to communicate with fellow contractors with messaging and information requests.

“We hope that we’ll create one of the winning, elegant software systems that we see in other industries and other tools,” DiBella said. “We’re inspired by systems like Carta or Asana or others that are just elegant in their design and how they’re created; are value priced; easy to learn, not requiring somebody to train or install a system for a government contractor.”

With the fresh funds, GovForce will be building this platform, with the hope of launching a product in early Q2. It will also be working to add government contractors onto the platform, as well as “back office” service providers such as accountants, HR providers, insurance providers and other professional services.  By the end of the year, the company also intends to use the funding to add three to five new employees, largely on the product development side.

Now, DiBella thinks, is an ideal time to create such a platform, especially as contractors struggle to meet changing standards. The standards for government tech are becoming more defined and strict, DiBella thinks, in the defense industrial space, and he hopes that GovForce can help.

“That is of big discussion right now within the community, adhering to the standards and what government contractors need to do with the data that they’re using every day,” DiBella said. “So that is a big focus for the GovForce technology platform build.”