The AI partner for winning government contracts. It reads the budget, maps the Pentagon, and points you at the deals you can actually close.
CAPTION: A navy arrow pointing up and to the right - the whole pitch in one mark. In a business built on knowing which way the money moves, Usul draws the vector for you.
Somewhere in San Francisco this morning, a fifteen-person company is quietly deciding which parts of the United States defense budget belong to its customers. Not guessing. Deciding. On the other end of the screen, a founder who has never set foot in the Pentagon is looking at a ranked list of contracts, a match score beside each one, and the name of the exact contracting officer who signs the check.
This is the ordinary weirdness of Usul. The company sits at the seam between the largest, slowest bureaucracy on earth and the fastest, most impatient founders alive - and it makes them talk to each other.
Government spending is a haystack the size of a nation. Usul is the magnet.
The premise is unglamorous and enormous. Every year, governments spend trillions of dollars buying things - roughly $8 trillion by Usul's count, spread across 60-plus nations. The information about who buys what, from whom, and why is technically public. It is also scattered across SAM.gov, DSIP, DLA DIBBS, budget documents written for insiders, and org charts that read like ancient scripture. The people who win contracts are usually the people who already know where the doors are. Usul's bet is that the doors should be findable by anyone with something worth selling.
Usul scrapes the Department of Defense's contracts, the defense budget, and the Program Executive Offices, then builds a profile of your company and hands you a daily-refreshed list of what you can win - and who to call to win it.
An inbox for capture teams that ranks federal opportunities by match score, pulling from SAM.gov, DSIP, and DLA DIBBS so you stop scrolling irrelevant solicitations.
AI-drawn maps of defense markets and Program Executive Offices - sizing the opportunity and showing which offices hold budget for what you build.
A business-development workspace that tracks funding lines, active contracts, and recompetes so your pipeline reflects reality, not hope.
Direct connections to program managers and contracting officers - navigate the government org chart to the person who actually awards the deal.
Jarren Reid did not arrive at defense contracting by accident. He left high school to start his first company, then worked at four government contractors - Palantir and MITRE among them - before dropping out of Stanford to help his former colleagues win more of the same contracts he'd watched them chase. He had seen, from the inside, that the game rewards familiarity over merit. Usul is his attempt to sell the familiarity to everyone.
He built it with Oliver Gomez and Joonghyun Lee, and the company took shape through Stanford's Hacking for Defense program before landing in Y Combinator's Summer 2024 batch. The team is small - about fifteen people - which is either a footnote or the whole point, depending on how you feel about a fifteen-person company parsing the defense budget of the United States.
Left high school to found a company; alumni of Palantir and MITRE; dropped out of Stanford to build Usul.
Stanford CS (AI) and Economics; previously at Palantir and a YC company.
Engineering backgrounds spanning Michigan ECE and Stanford Aero/Astro.
The Pentagon rewards insiders. Usul is trying to sell being an insider to everyone.
The names matter here. Steve Blank practically invented the modern startup vocabulary and co-created Hacking for Defense; Peter Newell ran the Army's Rapid Equipping Force. When people who spent careers inside the machine back a tool for beating the machine, it is worth noticing.
Return to the founder from the opening - the one staring at a ranked list this morning. A few years ago, that list did not exist. The path to a defense contract ran through a conference badge, a former colleague, a lunch, a rumor about which office had money left in the fiscal year. Merit was necessary but nowhere near sufficient. What you needed was to already be in the room.
Usul does not promise to win the contract for you. It cannot write your capability statement or make your product good. What it changes is smaller and, in its way, more radical: it makes the room findable. The haystack still exists. The budget is still enormous and still written in a dialect built to keep people out. But the magnet is on the table now, and it belongs to a company of fifteen betting that the next great defense supplier is somebody nobody in the Pentagon has met yet.
The doors were always there. Usul just turned on the lights.
Product tours & demos are featured on usul.com and Usul's YC launch page.