London-based Stotles has raised $6.5m (£5.3m) in seed funding to expand its platform that aims to make it easier for the private sector to do business with the public sector.
The startup has so far created tools to help commercial teams increase their public sales productivity when selling to governments.
Its platform provides a personalised feed of tenders and gives granular information on potential prospects.
But it sees a much larger opportunity to streamline the business-to-government market (B2G) and plans to use the fresh capital to develop its product, grow headcount in its product and commercial teams and expand into new locations outside of the UK.
For companies that secure government procurement deals, it can be highly lucrative. Tech giants Microsoft and Amazon spent years in litigation over the US Department of Defense’s $10bn JEDI cloud contract.
US venture capital firm Headline led Stotles’ funding round, with investment also coming from Form Ventures, GTMFund, Speedinvest, FJLabs and 7Percent.
Berlin-based angel investor Mathias HiIlpert, who has previously invested in the likes of sales platform Workbounce and urban air mobilty company Volocopter, also provided capital.
“Every day, we see the painful friction buyers and suppliers have to deal with — fragmented data, complex regulation, heavy compliance, messy workflows,” said Stotles CEO, John Witt. “Some call it ‘boring’, but they’re missing the point. This space has been overlooked for decades.
“By streamlining the business processes that connect business and government, the technology we’re building is capable of saving the world trillions every year – that’s something we get excited about.”
Founded in 2019, Stotles previously raised £1.4m in a pre-seed round in October 2020.
Christian Miele, partner at Headline and chairman at the German Startups Association, said: “I hear it daily from the highest level of governments: digitisation of public procurement is the single most important key to unlocking the future of the global public sector.
“Stotles is the team to enable this revolution globally and we couldn’t be more thrilled to back them.”