government-procurement
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Peter Ostrow Built a Career in the Unfashionable Middle
Before marketplaces became a default business model, Peter Ostrow was turning product specifications, federal rules and sales logistics into an online buying system. His career is a study in making complicated markets usable.
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.
Christian Hugo
Christian Hugo is the CEO of GovData Services Limited, a Warrington-based consultancy he has led since 2006 that helps British businesses - especially SMEs - access the £378 billion annual UK government procurement market. With over 30 years in the public sector space, Hugo played a role in the creation of G-Cloud, the UK's largest IT procurement framework, and has helped clients win over £40 billion in public sector contracts. A co-founder of Govnet Communications in 1997, he has built GovData into a firm that has guided more than 1,800 businesses through government framework submissions across IT, professional services, people, and buildings and infrastructure.