Government buyers can't find innovative companies. Companies can't navigate government. We're building the bridge.
A program manager searches for a company that builds exactly what three startups in Austin already sell. She doesn't find them. A startup with production-ready technology spends eighteen months trying to get in front of the right buyer. They give up. A contracting officer defaults to an incumbent—not because they're the best option, but because they're the only option the system surfaced.
We saw this play out hundreds of times. The government needs innovative solutions. Companies have them. The two sides can't find each other.
SAM.gov. FPDS. SBIR.gov. Agency strategic plans. Budget justifications. Congressional testimony. The raw inputs are all public. Hundreds of thousands of vendor profiles, contract records, and procurement signals sitting in databases that anyone can access.
What's missing is the layer that makes sense of it all—that connects a government buyer's need to the company that can fulfill it, regardless of whether they use the same words to describe it.
Outrider is a semantic search and matching platform for federal procurement. Instead of relying on keywords and NAICS codes, we use natural language understanding to match government needs with company capabilities based on meaning.
For government buyers, that means searching for "AI-powered logistics optimization" and finding companies that call themselves "supply chain intelligence platforms"—because they solve the same problem.
For companies, it means getting discovered by the agencies that need what you build, without having to guess which keywords a contracting officer might type into a search box.
Discovery is the starting point. We're building toward a procurement intelligence platform that helps both sides make better decisions—faster identification of qualified vendors, clearer signals on upcoming opportunities, and a data layer that makes the $700B federal contracting market as navigable as any commercial marketplace.
The government buying system won't rebuild itself overnight. But the gap between what exists and what gets found is a problem we can solve now.
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