August Chen

August Chen is the co-founder and CEO of Hazel, a Y Combinator-backed startup building AI-native procurement software for U.S. federal, state, and local government. A Harvard mechanical engineering and computer science graduate who built wildfire-prevention software at Palantir, Chen now aims his company at the $2.7 trillion public procurement market, helping overworked civil servants draft compliant solicitations in five minutes instead of five months. Hazel counts customers from K-12 school districts to the U.S. Navy and, in 2025, signed the City of Dallas as the first major Texas city to adopt AI for procurement.