Archon Technologies is a San Francisco startup (Y Combinator W25) that helps software companies sell to the U.S. government by automating FedRAMP, the federal compliance regime cloud vendors must clear before agencies can buy them. Its free-to-integrate SDK ships security controls compliant out of the box and, with AI-assisted documentation, aims to cut the certification timeline from roughly 16 months to 6 and save vendors about $1M. Founded by former U.S. State Department technologists George Parks and Sam Jung.
chromie.dev (YC S26) is an all-in-one business development, capture, and proposal platform that helps firms find, qualify, and win federal and state, local, and education (SLED) government contracts. Built on the founders' 'deterministic stack for web agents' - browser agents that pair LLM reasoning with the reliability of RPA - the platform continuously scrapes procurement portals, fit-scores opportunities, predicts recompetes before they hit the market, extracts buried requirements from RFPs and SOWs, and drafts compliant proposals, with every parsed field traced back to its source clause for audit and QA.
Fed10 is a full-stack AI legislative consulting firm that monitors every bill introduced across all 50 U.S. state legislatures and Congress, classifies whether each bill is a threat or opportunity to a specific client, drafts amendment language, and maps out who to call and what to say. Founded in 2025 by three former teenage lobbyists who dropped out of Harvard, Williams, and Berkeley, it aims to do the work of a $500/hour policy consultant in seconds instead of days.
Stella is a Y Combinator-backed AI assistant that turns any website into a 24/7 customer expert. Installed with a single line of code, it learns from a site's own content to answer visitor questions, qualify leads, and route complex cases to humans. Founded by Ryan Endacott (YC S22), Stella serves small businesses, SaaS companies, and local governments - including the Town of Carmel, NY, where it answered more than 2,400 resident questions and saved staff over 200 hours.
Quantela is a smart-city technology company that helps cities and communities digitize urban infrastructure through an AI- and IoT-powered data platform. Founded in 2015, it evolved from a dashboard tool into a full urban infrastructure platform spanning smart lighting, traffic, public safety, digital advertising and citizen services. Quantela is known for pioneering an 'outcomes-based' business model, funding projects up front in exchange for a share of the resulting revenue or savings, and operates across the Americas, EMEA, India and Asia-Pacific.
Colin MacNaught is the CEO and co-founder of BondLink, a Boston-based fintech company that brings modern technology and transparency to the municipal bond market. Before starting BondLink in 2015 with technologist Carl Query, he spent seven years managing debt for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, issuing close to $25 billion in bonds and notes and earning two national Deal of the Year awards from The Bond Buyer. He studied public finance at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and built BondLink to give public-sector issuers digital tools to reach investors, improve disclosure, and lower borrowing costs for taxpayers.
BondLink is a Boston-based financial technology company that builds cloud software for issuers in the roughly $4 trillion U.S. municipal bond market. Founded in 2015 by former Massachusetts debt manager Colin MacNaught and tech entrepreneur Carl Query, BondLink gives state and local governments, universities, hospitals and public utilities tools for investor relations websites, disclosure and compliance filing, deal marketing, investor outreach and debt-portfolio management - modernizing a historically opaque, paper-heavy corner of finance. Its platform has supported issuers in raising more than $70 billion in bonds, counts the State of California, City of Chicago and University of Texas among its clients, and is backed by Franklin Templeton and Intercontinental Exchange (parent of the NYSE).
Knox Systems is an Austin, Texas company that operates a pre-authorized, AI-managed federal cloud so that commercial SaaS vendors can reach FedRAMP authorization in roughly 90 days for about 90% less than the traditional cost. By running a shared, continuously monitored compliance boundary across AWS, Azure, and GCP, Knox lets customer applications inherit 60-80% of required security controls on day one, then automates evidence collection, documentation, and remediation. Founded in 2023 by Irina Denisenko, the company raised a $25M Series A in March 2026 and serves vendors such as Adobe, Celonis, OutSystems, Armis, and BigID across 15+ federal agency authorizations.
Odyssey is a New York-based education technology company that builds the software states use to run school-choice programs. Its platform administers education savings accounts (ESAs) and microgrant programs end-to-end - guiding parents through eligibility and applications, verifying identity in real time, disbursing state funds into digital wallets, and running regulated e-commerce marketplaces where families can spend on tuition, tutoring, curriculum, and technology. Founded in 2021 by former teacher and school-choice attorney Joseph Connor, Odyssey administers programs across states including Iowa, Idaho, Missouri, Georgia, Louisiana, Utah, Wyoming, and Texas, and has helped families access hundreds of millions of dollars in education funding.
Procurement Sciences is a Washington, D.C.-based company building Awarded AI, an AI-native platform that helps businesses find, win and deliver government contracts. Founded in 2022 by Marine Corps veteran and former contractor Christian Ferreira, the platform automates opportunity discovery, bid decisions, proposal drafting, compliance review and delivery across federal, state, local, education and international markets. After its May 2026 acquisition of market-intelligence platform HigherGov, the combined company serves more than 3,000 government contractors - including close to half of the industry Top 100 - and has contributed to over $100 billion in AI-assisted awarded contracts.
SkyFi is an Austin, Texas-based Earth intelligence company that runs a self-service marketplace for satellite imagery and analytics. Through a single web platform, mobile app and API, customers can search archives, task satellites and buy optical, SAR, hyperspectral and aerial imagery from more than 50 commercial providers - then run built-in AI analytics on it. Founded in 2021 by Luke Fischer and Bill Perkins, SkyFi aims to make geospatial data as easy to order as a rideshare, serving defense, government, finance, energy, agriculture, insurance and infrastructure customers worldwide.
Zencity is a govtech company that builds the leading platform for community trust, purpose-built for local government. It combines AI-driven social listening, statistically representative resident surveys, and communication tools to help cities, counties, and public safety agencies understand what residents think and turn that input into decisions, budgets, and policy. Founded in 2016 and headquartered in New York and Tel Aviv, Zencity works with more than 600 government agencies and has raised roughly $93M in venture funding.
Eyal Feder-Levy is the co-founder and CEO of Zencity, a govtech company that uses AI to turn millions of resident interactions into actionable insight for local governments. An urban planner by training who came up through nonprofit community work in South Tel Aviv, he started Zencity in 2015 to give cities a routine 'finger on the pulse' of their communities. Under his leadership the company has raised roughly $93M, works across six countries, and serves hundreds of government agencies reaching hundreds of millions of residents.
Irina Denisenko is the co-founder and CEO of Knox Systems, an Austin-based cybersecurity company that delivers 'FedRAMP as a Service' to help commercial software vendors get authorized to sell to the U.S. government in roughly 90 days instead of years. She started Knox in 2023 after living through the FedRAMP bottleneck herself as COO of Class Technologies, where she scaled the company to $50M in ARR. A repeat operator who also helped build drone company PrecisionHawk, Denisenko positions Knox as a challenger to Palantir's FedStart, backed by Felicis Ventures and roughly $31.5M in total funding.
Joseph Connor is the founder and CEO of Odyssey, a New York based technology company that helps states run school choice programs like education savings accounts (ESAs). A former classroom teacher at KIPP and Rocketship who went on to Notre Dame Law School and worked on the landmark Espinoza v. Montana Supreme Court case, Connor built Odyssey to make public education dollars easy for families to access. The platform has helped more than 140,000 students across seven states tap into over $375 million in state funding, and raised a $10 million Series A in 2024 led by Tusk Venture Partners with backing from a16z's Katherine Boyle.
CivicActions is a fully remote digital services firm that helps U.S. federal, state, and local government agencies modernize the technology behind public services. Founded in 2004 by Henry Poole and Aaron Pava, the company pairs free and open-source software - especially Drupal - with agile delivery, DevSecOps, human-centered design, and accessibility expertise to rebuild legacy government websites and platforms. Guided by the values of Balance, Openness, and Care, CivicActions has served agencies including Veterans Affairs, the FCC, the National Science Foundation, and the State of Georgia while contributing heavily back to the open-source communities its work depends on.
Binti is a San Francisco-based software company building modern workflow tools for the child welfare system. Its cloud platform helps social workers license foster and adoptive families, find kin, manage cases, coordinate service referrals, and meet federal reporting requirements. Used by more than 550 agencies across 36 states plus D.C. - covering roughly half of children in U.S. foster care - Binti aims to reduce paperwork so caseworkers can spend more time helping children find safe, stable, loving families.
Legion Intelligence is a San Francisco company building a governed, agentic AI platform for national security and regulated enterprises. Formerly Yurts, it lets defense agencies and Fortune 500 teams deploy and orchestrate AI agents across cloud, on-prem, air-gapped, and classified networks (IL-2 through IL-6) using any large language model, with human-in-the-loop control and full auditability. Its platform has been fielded at U.S. Special Operations Command, the U.S. Army, and the Department of Energy, where it cut intelligence-summary creation time by 94% and saved staff hundreds of hours per week.
Obvio is a San Carlos, California startup building solar-powered, AI-equipped camera pylons that watch intersections for dangerous driving - running stop signs, speeding, illegal turns, crosswalk violations and distracted driving. The cameras process footage on-device, flag only genuine violations for human review, and hand verified cases to local police, who decide whether to issue citations. Obvio installs the hardware for municipalities at no upfront cost and earns revenue from a share of citation fees. Founded by former Motive engineers Ali Rehan and Dhruv Maheshwari, the company raised a $22 million Series A led by Bain Capital Ventures in June 2025 and reports that early Maryland deployments cut stop-sign running by roughly 50-70%.
Rec Technologies builds the software that runs local Parks & Recreation - a modern operating system that lets residents discover, book, and pay for courts, classes, clinics, and community programs, while giving recreation departments the tools to schedule staff, manage facilities, and grow revenue. Founded in 2022 by former Uber and The Athletic operators Birju Kadakia and Rachel Williams, Rec is used by 100+ cities and communities and raised an $11M Series A in 2025 led by Crosslink Capital with backing from athletes including Kevin Durant, Larry Fitzgerald, Joe Montana, and Kelvin Beachum.
Signals is NationGraph's buying-trigger engine for companies selling to state, local, education and defense (SLED) buyers. It aggregates thousands of public sector data sources - budgets, RFPs, board meeting minutes, grant awards, contract renewals and personnel changes - and converts them into scored, ranked opportunities that surface before a formal RFP is ever published. The result is delivered daily, organized by account, and synced into Salesforce, HubSpot and Slack so sellers can act on intent instead of waiting for the bid.
Acentra Health is a McLean, Virginia healthcare technology and clinical services company formed in 2023 from the merger of CNSI and Kepro. It builds Medicaid and Medicare systems, care management platforms, and quality-oversight services for state and federal government health programs, combining public-sector software with clinical staff who review authorizations, assessments, and appeals. Backed by The Carlyle Group, it employs roughly 3,300-3,400 people across the U.S. and India.
dMetrics is an AI company that builds Minsky, a natural-language-processing platform letting non-technical subject-matter experts create their own AI models to read, track, and analyze huge volumes of messy text - without writing code. Founded by two MIT machine-learning PhDs, the company started by decoding healthcare conversations across social media and now serves financial, pharmaceutical, and public-sector customers, including a five-year, $99.5M U.S. Department of Defense production contract for open-source threat analysis.
Emerge Career is a New York-based reentry and workforce development company that partners with governments to train and place justice-involved and low-income people into high-paying, AI-resilient skilled-trade careers such as commercial truck driving, HVAC, and diesel technology. Its technology platform combines self-paced vocational coursework, exam prep, trauma-informed career coaching, and job placement, with training delivered in partnership with licensed schools and correctional agencies. Founded in 2022 out of Y Combinator by Uzoma Orchingwa and Gabriel Saruhashi, the company has won state and city contracts from Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New York City's Next Mile NYC program.
Hazel is a New York-based startup building AI-native software for U.S. government procurement. Its platform helps state, local, and federal agencies define requirements, draft solicitations (RFPs, RFQs, RFBs), run market research, and evaluate vendor responses in one place - compressing a process that often takes months into days while keeping agencies compliant. Founded in 2024 by Harvard classmates August Chen and Elton Lossner and backed by Y Combinator, Hazel counts the City of Dallas, City of Atlanta, PhilaPort, and the U.S. Air Force among its early adopters.
Informed K12 is a workflow automation and digital forms platform built specifically for the operational complexity of K-12 school districts. It replaces paper and PDF forms with online workflows that route automatically through the real approval chains districts already use - across finance, HR, student services, and IT - capturing e-signatures and a time-stamped audit trail without replacing the ERP, HRIS, or SIS a district already runs. Founded in 2012 by two Stanford Graduate School of Education classmates, the company (formerly Chalk Schools) serves hundreds of districts and employs roughly 70-75 people.
Istari Digital is a Cambridge, Massachusetts software company building a digital engineering platform that connects fragmented engineering data - models, simulations, requirements and test artifacts - across teams, suppliers and classified environments. Founded in 2022 by former Air Force acquisition chief Will Roper, the company aims to let regulated industries like aerospace and defense validate, secure and certify complex systems in minutes instead of months. Its flagship effort, Flyer One, is working with the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory and Lockheed Martin Skunk Works to make a modified X-56A the world's first digitally certified aircraft.
KARDA, Inc. is a San Francisco-based artificial intelligence company that turns police body-worn camera footage into fully drafted, court-ready reports in minutes. Founded in 2023 by Stanford-trained engineer Armando Torres, KARDA uses video and audio analysis, natural language processing, and machine learning to cut the two-to-four hours officers spend on daily paperwork down to roughly ten minutes. The platform is FBI CJIS compliant, uses end-to-end encryption, integrates with existing Records Management Systems, and adds a multilingual kiosk for non-emergency community crime reporting.
Marketplace.city is a Chicago-based govtech company that helps state and local governments source, validate, and procure technology. Its Clearbox platform turns a repository of historical vendor, contract, and pricing data into managed procurement services (Clearbox Procure) and a research subscription (Clearbox Source), aiming to compress technology buying cycles that once ran months or years down to roughly 100 days. Founded out of a 2016 collaboration with New York City's Mayor's Office of Technology and Innovation, the company has supported over 200 governments.
Nucleos is a San Francisco Bay Area public benefit corporation building secure e-learning software for people who are incarcerated. Its Learning Platform runs inside the locked-down IT environments of prisons and jails, stripping out the roughly 95% of digital coursework that facilities normally block for security reasons, so incarcerated learners can access GED prep, college degrees, vocational training, and wellness programs on tablets and kiosks. Founded by Noah Freedman and Camila Vega out of a Stanford education-technology project, Nucleos aims to reduce recidivism by making education - one of the most effective reentry interventions - actually usable behind bars.