AI-enabled procurement marketplace for government
Hazel sells AI-powered procurement software to the 19,000 state & local governments who procure $2T a year. Hazel uses LLMs to accelerate and improve a bidding process currently done with 20-year-old technology, bringing in more high-quality bidders and delivering better outcomes for government
Active Founders
August Chen
@Palantir, I built wildfire prevention apps that led to a 99% reduction in acres impacted by wildfires in CA. I also developed several channel partnerships from 0 ->1, securing $Xmm in high-margin licenses. MechE/CS @ Harvard '20. Led MakeHarvard. My thesis was on how we can safely deploy aerosols into the stratosphere to save Earth (see: geoengineering).
Elton Lossner
Originally from Atlanta, Elton graduated with a bachelor's in Electrical Engineering from Harvard, where he cofounded MakeHarvard and wrote a thesis using ML for controlling medical exoskeletons. He interned in data engineering for Capital One and aerospace engineering for Hedron, a space startup. He spent four years at BCG, exiting as Project Leader. He built lots of slides and led strategy and procurement cases in Aerospace & Defense for government and industry.
Company Launches
📝 BLUF
Hazel applies AI to create an equitable and accessible marketplace for businesses to bid on government contracts. Contracts are separately issued by governments, and responses must meet long lists of criteria to be compliant and award-eligible, making them immensely hard and time-consuming to write. Hazel breaks down that moat.
If you or anyone you know wants to get matched to or respond to government RFPs, please contact us!
🥷 About Us
We’re Elton and August, in SF for this YC W24 batch. We’re excited to announce Hazel, an AI-driven marketplace that enables businesses to quickly respond to issued government RFPs in a compliant manner.
The two of us met in college before taking separate jobs at Palantir and Boston Consulting Group – but our focus on mission and serving the public interest remained the same, and we saw something that we knew had to be fixed.
📄 Problem
The government contracting process is broken. Contracts are separately posted on thousands of different websites and can include hundreds of pages of overlapping compliance regulations. Responding to bids can require entire business divisions supported by armies of consultants and in-house lawyers. Even the simplest of contracts – if you can find one that fits your business – require responses spanning dozens of pages, and the tiniest compliance error will jeopardize your entire submission.
The US has created a system where it is almost impossible for SMBs to win work with the government. As incumbents become even more entrenched, governments face increasing prices and deteriorating performance because they have allowed for no alternatives. With over $1T of infrastructure funding now on the line for award, the US cannot afford the status quo.
🧠 Solution
Use AI to automate discovery, drafting, and compliance. Instead of spending days trawling local websites and weeks writing fruitless proposals, you should only spend minutes defining your scope of work and price.
Use Hazel to get matched to a potential contract, synthesize a draft response based on the RFP and your company information, create a checklist of to-dos, and run compliance checks. No more scrambling to register your company the day before submission. No more losing a bid because you missed a cybersecurity requirement listed on page 13 of Appendix G.
{Choose which sections to include in your response, view a timeline of the next steps for the process, and use GenAI to craft your answer based on existing company documentation.}
📈 Asks
- Reach out! We’re excited to help users win new bids with US government agencies, particularly at the state and local level
- Spread the word! We’ve heard from countless people how frustrating government RFP processes are. If you have any contacts involved in government RFP writing or solicitation, we’d love to connect with them
Reach out to us at august@hazeltech.ai and elton@hazeltech.ai with the above or any other comments and questions. Let’s bring more winners to government contracting.