Rohirrim, a Reston artificial intelligence company, has raised $15 million to continue working on its ChatGPT-like tool that helps companies speed the process of bidding on jobs.
New York software investment firm Insight Partners led the Series A round and Boston’s General Purpose Venture Capital also took part. The financing will allow Rohirrim to accelerate sales of its software that aims to cut down on the average time it takes to put together responses to requests for proposals, or RFPs, from large companies or government agencies. Its software product — dubbed Rohan — uses a customer’s secure data to help proposal writers more efficiently collect internal information to write RFP responses.
In the 11 months Rohan has been on the market, Rohirrim has brought in several million dollars in revenue, CEO and founder Steven Aberle said in an interview. With this latest investment, Aberle intends to accelerate hiring and, he hopes, set up office space for what is now a fully remote company.
Aberle said he decided to start Rohirrim after he was stuck on an hours-long work call one Saturday afternoon working on a proposal that was due Monday. His daughter’s birthday was also that Saturday and Aberle said he missed “everything on that day for this call.” Frustrated, he decided it was time to start something new that could help make proposal writing more efficient. In February 2022, Rohirrim — the name is a reference to a warrior class in the “Lord of the Rings” books — was born.
Roughly 85% of the startup's customers are in the defense and aerospace industries, said Aberle, who was previously chief product officer at Fairfax data analytics firm NNDATA and has also held leadership positions at CACI International Inc. (NYSE: CACI) and Charlottesville’s Ironbridge Technologies. Industries such as commercial real estate, energy, higher education, insurance, law, consulting firms, and global engineering firms have also found use for its software, the company said.
Technology and consulting giant IBM is one of its customers. James Farley, vice president of enterprise solutions for IBM, said the firm's use of Rohirrim's AI-generated software has "streamlined content creation," allowing the IBM team "to focus on higher-value tasks."
"The potential it brings to our industry and others is here, and we can't afford to ignore it," Farley said in a statement Monday.
This is Rohirrim’s first major funding round following the $2.5 million it raised in seed funding late last year.
The company has roughly doubled its headcount over the past year to 30 employees, Aberle said, and plans to roughly double again in 2024. His first priority is hiring a sales team.
“We haven’t had a single salesperson at the company since our first one we hired two weeks ago,” Aberle said, adding that most of the company’s customers have found it through word of mouth and referrals. Brian Sheely is the firm’s new vice president of sales.
Chief engineering officer is another role the firm wants to fill quickly, said Aberle, who is currently serving in that role himself.
The company is fully remote, though Rohirrim has a couple of offers out for an office space it hopes to open early next year in either Tysons or Reston — where most of its customers are today. The office will serve as a training center to help customers learn how to use the data-heavy technology.
Its training team spends between one-and-a-half weeks and six weeks working with proposal-writing teams at client firms on the technology. “Some people pick it up very quickly,” Aberle said, but others who are less familiar with AI models take longer. “If you’ve never been exposed to it, it works very differently from the traditional keyword, search-based systems that people have been wielding for the last 15, 20 years.”
Through all that, Aberle said his team will also keep building out its language models. Building its own is what allows it to keep client data secure.
