Hazel

📝 BLUF

Hazel is the only AI-native solution which enables public sector procurement teams to seamlessly define requirements, generate solicitations, conduct market research, and evaluate responses in one place. Public sector procurement is a time-intensive process held together by Microsoft Office, legacy point solutions, tribal knowledge, and severely overworked civil servants. Hazel is building an AI-powered platform to accelerate and streamline this mission.

We’ve engaged hundreds of government agencies with diverse missions, and we’ve been hard at work building something they want. We’re already on contract with several governments and have received funding from agencies ranging from public school districts to the U.S. Navy!

If you know anyone supporting government procurement, please contact us!

🦅 About Us + What’s New

We’re Elton and August, and we along with our 3 amazing founding software engineers currently operate out of NYC, Boston, DC, and Salt Lake City. We’re excited to (finally) re-launch Hazel, an AI-native solution which enables government procurement teams to quickly and easily manage their procurement processes.

The two of us met in college before taking separate jobs at Palantir and Boston Consulting Group, but our focus on public service remained the same, and we saw something that we knew had to be fixed. Along the way, we’ve picked up incredible mission-driven teammates with experience from Lockheed Martin, MITRE, SpaceX, Peraton, the U.S. Air Force, the U.S. Department of State, and USAID.

We began by building a solution for businesses to bid on RFPs because we wanted to help governments. The idea was that by bringing more businesses to the table, more competitive bids would both save governments money and deliver better performance. However, we soon realized that if our mission was to help government, we will best accomplish that by going directly B2G, not B2B2G. It means accepting the known challenges of selling to government as a startup (long sales cycles, a litany of compliance standards, nobody returns your emails, a new language of business, etc.), but nothing worthwhile - or fulfilling - comes easy.

🏛️ Problem

Civil servants in procurement are overwhelmed. ~30% of procurement roles in government are unfilled as these employees retire or quit. Their current solutions are dated – one to two decades behind the equivalent in B2B SaaS, gated behind sleepy incumbents leveraging political connections and litigation to stay on top. The lack of tools and talent means governments are more stretched than ever when it comes to buying the goods and services they need in a compliant and timely manner. This challenge is eating away at all levels of government, from local K-12 school districts to the Pentagon. As prices rise and the demands on governments grow, it becomes even more critical to strategically purchase the right tools for their success. Failure means degradation in service delivery, bad publicity, or even disaster.

A maze of legal restrictions, understaffed departments, and growing complexity of requirements have made it near impossible to rapidly procure goods and services without defaulting to an existing incumbent. Governments would love to diversify their options or recompete… but choosing the default has shifted from a matter of convenience to an operational necessity. Over $2.7T is on the line for public procurement annually.

There has never been a more pressing – or opportune – time to address the procurement challenges taxing our government’s efficiency. Climate goals require rapidly procuring sustainable and efficient energy solutions nationwide. The new era of great power competition requires procuring novel weapon systems at scale to secure democracies in the Pacific and Eastern Europe. Our aging procurement systems are creaking under their weight and cannot unlock the potential of our nation.

🔥 Solution

Hazel’s platform accelerates and automates the rote, time-intensive tasks of researching, generating and managing solicitations. Instead of trading documents over email and doing market research via cursory Google searches, civil servants should have a single streamlined platform that assists them in doing their jobs.

Hazel combines AI agents and a modern UI/UX to deliver a consumer-grade solution that surfaces critical information to human decision-makers, saving time and driving better outcomes. Hazel is the AI superpower for procurement teams short on staff and time but hungry for innovation and a way to do things better.

(Screenshot of the Hazel platform) Save legal-approved boilerplates, design content sections using our AI agents, and drag-and-drop them into templates. Compliant first-draft solicitations using the agency’s template in five minutes, not five months. Edit collaboratively in real-time and seamlessly export to Word when done. No copy-paste required.

🫡 Asks

• Do you have any contacts in government who navigate their agency’s internal procurement processes? If so, we’d love to connect with them!
• Reach out to us at august@hazelai.com and elton@hazelai.com with any other comments, questions. We’re building AI for the public interest 🇺🇸