Humba Ventures is excited to announce our investment in GovForce, a Washington D.C.-based startup powering performance, compliance, and collaboration for the government contractors (GovCons) who keep America on track. We co-led the round with QED Investors, with participation from Cambrian and NextGen Venture Partners. We’re thrilled to welcome Tonio, Brendon, and Jason to the Humba Family.
As an ex-engineer and a VC, I’m a big fan of applying software to increase productivity and reduce tedious work. GovCons are a huge part of our economy — they’re responsible for providing almost $700B in goods and services to our government! — but they have been relatively ignored by the tech community. They have to deal with especially strict compliance and documentation standards, but without the modern tooling available to many other industries. That’s why I got excited when Tonio, the CEO of GovForce, told me about his plans for building a modern compliance and collaboration suite for GovCons.
GovForce makes it easy for government contractors and their subcontractors to collaborate on work, and to ensure that compliance standards are met and maintained. The latter is especially important because prime contractors are responsible for the contract compliance status of their subcontractors, but most struggle with compliance because of the numerous rules and requirements that are involved. Solving these problems with 21st century software means that GovCons can focus on “real” work instead of paperwork, and that in turn makes our government more efficient. GovForce is one of very few startups that can genuinely help Americans get much higher leverage on the taxes that we pay.
Over the past decade of investing we’ve seen firsthand that founder/market fit plays a huge role in startup success, and the founding team at GovForce has a terrific set of backgrounds for building in this space:
- Tonio spent a decade in the Naval Academy and the Marines, a few years in startups, and a few years as CEO of Vemo, one of the most successful companies in the ISA space. He is also a Director at Veterans Legal Advocacy Group.
- Brendon has experience as a fintech CRO and a Naval Officer, and led GovCon financing initiatives at his previous company.
- Jason is a 3x startup CTO and a serial founder, and has spent a lot of his career building software in regulated industries like healthcare.
With this founding team DNA in place, we believe GovForce will bring a new level of efficiency to the government contracting sector. There is so much wasted time, effort, and money at the national level, and eliminating that waste is a wonderful mission to pursue. I couldn’t be more excited to partner with this team.
Our Investment in GovForce was originally published in Susa Ventures on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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