A Fairfax company landed $2.8M to simplify government contract management

Fairfax-headquartered GovPort announced a $2.8 million extension of its existing seed round on Wednesday. To date, the firm has raised $5.3 million, including the $2.5 million it earned through the seed round it previously announced in February 2023. 

GovPort, founded in 2022, developed a secure portal to help federal government contractors collaborate with partners and subcontractors through tools like document and task management. The platform aims to help contractors more easily work together in one unified setting, with the option to comment on files and send requests between one another, for example 

“We have the premise that if we can provide a platform to both parties that allows them to manage the relationship within one place, it cuts out the need for multiple different technologies to be used,” said Michael Heyman, the head of growth at GovPort. 

Overall, GovPort’s goal is to help contractors manage a “complex” and “really dense ecosystem” of federal government contracting, Heyman explained. 

Heyman, who joined the team in January, is one of about 10 employees scattered between the DC area, Atlanta and Boston. 

A rendering of the GovPort platform. (Courtesy)

This seed round extension was led by the Palo Alto venture capital firm PruVen Capital, with co-investment from San Francisco’s Fin Capital. QED Investors in Alexandria and Humba Ventures in San Francisco co-led the first round but did not invest in the extension. A few other firms, including Baltimore-based NextGen Venture Partners, are also investors in the company.

This round’s leading VC firms are providing not just funds, Heyman said, but also advice on how to grow the startup.  

“They’ve been tremendously helpful and giving us guidance and giving us, really, things to expand our horizon on,” Heyman said. “It’s always good to have that outside counsel, which our existing investors have been tremendously doing.”

With these funds, GovPort will further develop its platform and add new features, per Heyman, including building out an e-signature feature in the portal. 

GovPort has around 100 clients, primarily small-to-midsized contractors, using the platform. The firm also works with 10 enterprise contractors. 

Heyman, who declined to share further details about the firm’s clients, said that the company has been working with the National Contract Management Association to gather insights from government contractors on what issues they find most prevalent. That professional membership organization helped disseminate a survey whose findings GovPort published in a January report. That study found that government contractors struggle with document and subcontractor management — a process that GovPort leaders hope to streamline. 

“We’ve been able to really get a really good understanding of the market and realize that a lot of these folks need support,” Heyman said. “So we feel like this is a really good time to ultimately anchor ourselves into a division, in a role … that ultimately is going to add tremendous value for the bottom line for them.”