Mariel
Reed.

The unglamorous lever for changing lives at scale

Walk into any city hall and ask what makes the place run, and nobody points to the procurement office. It is the room of forms, the place where good ideas go to wait. Mariel Reed looked at that room and saw a $2 trillion opportunity hiding in plain sight.

Reed is the co-founder and CEO of Pavilion, the company she launched as CoProcure in 2019 and rebranded in 2023. The product is deceptively plain: a search engine for the contracts that state and local governments have already competitively bid. A school district in Ohio needs new laptops. Somewhere, another agency already ran the months-long process to select a vendor and negotiate a price. Pavilion helps the second buyer find and reuse the first one's work - legally, through cooperative and "piggyback" contracts - instead of starting from a blank page.

The pitch is boring on purpose. Government buys roughly $2 trillion of goods and services a year, and most of that spend moves through paperwork that nobody outside the building ever sees. Reed's bet is that making it visible is one of the most powerful levers anyone can pull for the public. As she put it in the announcement that introduced the company to the world: "Public procurement is one of the most powerful levers for improving lives at scale."

She likes to strip the jargon out of it. Procurement, in her telling, is just shopping with a purchase order. The trouble is that government does its shopping fifty times over, each agency re-running the same process in isolation, each vendor re-selling into a maze of disconnected buyers. Private companies look at that maze and walk away. "Why would we go and try to sell into government?" she has said, paraphrasing the tech firms that never bother. "It just doesn't make economic sense." Pavilion exists to change that math.

Xinjiang, Beijing, Coursera - then a detour into city hall

Reed did not arrive at procurement in a straight line. She grew up in a small town in Massachusetts and finished Georgetown University in 2010 as the valedictorian of her class, with a degree in Foreign Service and a certificate in Asian Studies. Then she went east. As a Princeton in Asia fellow she spent a year teaching in Xinjiang, China. After that came a job in Beijing with the China Medical Board, an American philanthropic foundation working on public health across Asia.

The education theme followed her to Silicon Valley. She joined Coursera as an early employee and spent roughly three years as its regional manager for Asia, helping the online-learning company push into China and India. It was heady, mission-driven work - democratizing access to education - and she has been candid that the early days came with a heavy dose of imposter syndrome.

What changed everything was a move inside government itself. Reed took a role as a senior innovation strategist in San Francisco's Mayor's Office of Civic Innovation, working on procurement, talent, and public-private partnerships. From the inside, she watched smart public servants fight the same buying battles again and again, with no shared memory between them. That was the itch she could not stop scratching.

Before she built anything, she studied. Reed spent more than a year mapping the procurement landscape, and the more she looked the clearer the gap became: plenty of tools helped governments create contracts and onboard vendors, but nothing helped them reuse the work other governments had already finished. That absence was the company.

One career, many maps

A pandemic launch, and a vision that felt insane

Reed co-founded the company with Alicia Chen, who had been Dropbox's first female engineer - a partnership Reed points to when she talks about building a diverse team on purpose. They started with two people and a thesis. Then COVID-19 arrived, and rather than freezing the market, it cracked it open. Procurement suddenly became strategic. Agencies that had resisted digital tools for years adopted them in weeks. CoProcure's usage jumped more than 300% across all 50 states, and the team doubled.

In May 2020 the company raised a $2.4 million seed round led by Neo, with Leadout Capital, Forum Ventures, and a roster of angels that read like a tour of consumer tech: Katrina Lake of Stitch Fix, Marco Zappacosta of Thumbtack, Dan Lewis of Convoy. The idea that big-name founders would back a startup about government paperwork was, in Reed's own framing, the kind of vision that "felt insane at the beginning" and is "becoming inevitable."

She tells the founding story with an unusually long memory. Reed often reaches back to her own family - a great-great-grandfather who came to America alone and lived in a synagogue basement before working his way into college - when she talks about why access and mobility matter to her. It is not a throwaway line. It is the through-thread connecting a teacher in Xinjiang, a strategist in city hall, and a CEO trying to make government buying fairer.

That reframing is the whole company in one sentence. Most people see procurement as a gate. Reed sees it as a bridge. If a small or diverse business can find every government that wants what it sells, and every government can find work another agency already vetted, the $2 trillion stops being a wall and starts being a network.

People first, problem second, ego last

Ask Reed how she spends her time and the answer is not product specs. She has said roughly half her hours go to people - hiring, culture, the human machinery of a growing company. "People matter," she puts it. "Be intentional about who you work with and culture." For someone whose product is a search index of contracts, she is strikingly uninterested in talking about software.

She also thinks out loud about the parts of startup life that go unexamined - who gets to take the risk of joining an early-stage company, who has the privilege to do it, and how a founder builds equity into a team rather than assuming it. That reflectiveness is a feature, not a footnote. It is why the procurement pitch keeps circling back to fairness: cheaper, faster public buying is not the goal, it is the mechanism. The goal is a government that works better for the people paying for it.

Find her, follow her, read her