Founded by CEO Alexander Cohen in 2022, GovPro AI is a nine-person tech startup working to simplify and shorten the request-for-proposal process that government contracting organizations go through when seeking bids for work. It’s a task that can take up to two months to complete but is one that GovPro AI’s platform can turn around 48 hours or less.
The company, which has about 2,000 square feet of space between its headquarters in Petworth and a location in Arlington, has trained its artificial intelligence model to produce what Cohen described as essentially equating to a draft proposal, one he stressed should be reviewed and edited by a human before it gets formally submitted. Work to add more abilities is well underway.
How it started: GovPro AI’s origins date back to Cohen’s days as a proposal writer, a side job he took to help pay for graduate school in 2021. In the process of writing some two dozen formal pitches as a government contractor for service-disabled veteran-owned small businesses, which he estimates converted into about $150 million in funded efforts, Cohen began to pick up on the nuances behind the request-for-proposal (RFP) response process.
Following graduation and a desired departure to leave this work in pursuit of his job at Google, Cohen said his previous clients began reaching out to him given his familiarity with the process of filing these proposals, a task he said is difficult for organizations to bring new hires up to speed on as it relates to their specific needs and requests.
“The way it works with proposals is it’s really hard to keep up on how to know where in the past library of proposals all of the right information is,” Cohen said. “You basically have to train a brand new golden retriever to dig up the bones of a proposal all over again, which is a pretty annoying process.”
It was also at this time that generative AI tools started to become popular among personal and business users. Surely it could also be used to streamline the proposal writing process, too, he theorized.
“I found out that there wasn’t enough security and there weren’t a lot of these tools built specifically for the government proposal writing, and I decided to create a tool just for that,” he said. “It started with those same customers who I’d been working with for a while, and then it grew from there, and eventually I had to leave my job in order to be supporting and growing our customers.”
The challenge today: Going forward, Cohen said it’s important for GovPro AI to continue to support small businesses, especially those owned and run by underrepresented people. This platform allows these companies to better compete with larger, more established firms, he said. The startup’s work will only prove more important as the scale and scope of AI platforms grow and become more widespread in use, too.
Doing so will require hiring more people, a hurdle that Cohen and many other young tech companies continue to face. Specifically, GovPro AI is hiring for roles in customer support as well as those with experience as former government contracting officers or government contract specialists looking for full-time work. He’s interested in hiring people around the nation to fulfill this work.
He said he also needs to ensure the company has enough bandwidth to support more customers over time. Cohen declined to disclose revenue figures but noted the company is profitable and has done so without taking on any form of outside investment.
What’s next: Building out the GovPro AI product more so than its feature set today is a priority for the months ahead, he said.
“For us, we’re selling an AI-enabled service, we’re actually selling the output of the AI like a rough draft of the proposal itself,” Cohen said. In the future, he wants the company to be able to deliver other AI tools that can help augment and support different parts of the proposal process.
“We cover a large majority of the way that the government acquires goods and services but there are so many different agencies that have unique workflows and unique requirements and needs and do things in their own special way,” Cohen said. “We’re always trying to build tools to do that.”
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