CLEATUS Raises $4M Seed to Make Government Contracting Accessible to Every Small Business
TL;DR CLEATUS has raised a $4M seed round co-led by Las Olas Venture Capital and REVO Capital, with participation from Motley Fool Ventures. The funding accelerates our mission to make government contracting accessible to every small and midsize business through an agentic AI platform that automates the full find-bid-win workflow.
The biggest buyer on earth, and the hardest one to sell to
U.S. federal, state, and local governments award roughly $2.7 trillion in contracts every year. That includes nearly $2 trillion at the state, local, and education (SLED) level and another $700B+ in federal. It's the largest procurement market in the world.
It's also one of the most gatekept. The barrier to entry isn't the work; it's everything around the work. The lingo. Hundreds of FAR clauses. Compliance requirements that read like tax code. Solicitation documents written in lawyer language. And the information itself is scattered across thousands of portals, each with its own login, format, and quirks.
Large primes have entire departments for every step. Small and midsize businesses, the ones that often do the best work, have a founder and a deadline. Most never even try.
Today, you have to be good at contracting to win contracts. We believe that's about to change.
Why AI changes this industry
Government contracting is one of the best applications of modern AI we've ever seen. The work is intimidating to a human, but it's exactly the kind of work LLMs are built for: massive volumes of dense regulatory text, long contract documents, compliance checklists, and thousands of fragmented data sources that need to be read, understood, and cross-referenced.
With the right agents doing the heavy lifting (reading the solicitation, flagging the FAR clauses, checking eligibility, drafting responses against the actual evaluation criteria), the bottleneck shifts. You no longer have to be a contracting expert to win a contract. You have to be good at the work itself. If you can do the job, AI can help you compete for it.
That's the shift we're building for.
Why this funding, and why now
CLEATUS is an AI-powered platform that runs the full government contracting workflow: find, manage, win. AI agents match you to high-fit opportunities across SAM.gov and tens of thousands of state, local, education, and defense sources, track every pursuit from capture to submission, and plan, write, and build your proposals, all stitched together with custom workflows that automate the whole process end to end.
We've already helped 500+ contractors find, bid on, and win government contracts. This $4M lets us go deeper, with more sources, smarter agents, and a full procurement OS built for the teams who've never had one.
The investors backing this mission
We're proud to partner with three firms that deeply understand what's broken in this market.
Las Olas Venture Capital (co-lead)
Seed-stage B2B specialists from Fort Lauderdale, led by founder-operators who've been on the other side of the table. Mark Volchek founded Higher One and Dean Hatton served as its CEO, an edtech platform they built and took public on the NYSE. Along with Nate Vasel, they invest in just 3–5 companies a year: high conviction, hands-on. They don't just write checks; they build alongside you.
Revo Capital (co-lead)
Founding Partner and Managing Director Cenk Bayrakdar on why Revo led:
For decades, government contracting has operated behind a wall of fragmented data, manual processes, and institutional complexity, a market worth over $2 trillion dollars, yet still largely untouched by AI. CLEATUS is breaking that paradigm with agentic AI that doesn't just surface opportunities, but actively evaluates, qualifies, and executes alongside contractors. What convinced us was not only the team's exceptional combination of GovCon expertise and deep technical capability, but also the speed at which they are turning AI into measurable operational leverage for SMB contractors. Processing billions of data points into actionable intelligence, reducing proposal workflows from days to minutes, and building trusted distribution through institutions embedded in the ecosystem creates a very powerful foundation. We believe CLEATUS has the potential to become an all-in-one solution for GovCon operators with an AI operating system and embedded finance solutions.
Motley Fool Ventures
For more than thirty years, The Motley Fool has helped individual investors take on the institutions that dominate Wall Street. Motley Fool Ventures backs founders extending that fight into other industries. CLEATUS is doing it in government contracting, giving small businesses a real shot at a trillion-dollar market that's long rewarded whoever could navigate it, not whoever could do the work.
Why this matters beyond CLEATUS
Solving this is bigger than any one company.
When more small businesses can compete for contracts, the government gets lower prices and better solutions, because competition drives both. The economy gets stronger, because every contract won by an SMB is revenue flowing into a business that hires, invests, and grows. And the businesses doing great work actually get a shot at the contracts they deserve to win.
Today's system concentrates government spend among a handful of large primes who know how to navigate it. More competition means a fairer system for everyone: taxpayers, agencies, and the SMBs that have been locked out for decades.
What's next
This funding lets us accelerate on three fronts:
- More sources: expanding coverage across federal, state, local, education, and DIBBS
- Smarter AI: purpose-built agents for market intelligence, capture, compliance, and proposal writing
- A full procurement marketplace: an AI operating system with embedded fintech, so SMBs can find, win, and get paid on contracts in one place
If you're an SMB that's ever looked at a government RFP and thought "I can do this work, but I can't do this process," we built CLEATUS for you.
We're just getting started.
🚀 Find, Bid, Win Government Contracts with AI.
About Las Olas Venture Capital
LOVC is a seed-stage lead investor VC firm. We typically lead seed rounds of $3–5M in B2B software companies and then work closely with the founders to get them to the next level. We believe there is a new generation of B2B companies that are emerging out of places that are largely ignored by traditional venture capital, and that this is a global phenomenon driven by the mass digitization of industries. We aim to be the partner of choice for those founders. Learn more at lasolasvc.com.
About Revo Capital
Founded in 2013, Revo Capital is Türkiye's pioneering and largest early-stage technology venture capital fund. With over $250 million raised across three funds, Revo has invested in 51 startups, including early backing of category leaders such as Midas, ikas, Param, Massive Bio, Getir, Paraşüt, Foriba, and Logiwa, and has completed 18 successful exits to date. In 2025, Revo launched its $100 million third fund, anchored by International Finance Corporation, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, KfW DEG, leading corporations, family offices, and HNWIs. Revo focuses on AI-driven fintech, B2B SaaS, cybersecurity, health tech, energy, and gaming, with the goal of investing in 30 early-stage startups with Turkish roots or R&D teams in Türkiye by 2030, supporting them from seed through Series A and B as they scale globally. Learn more at revo.vc.
About Motley Fool Ventures
Motley Fool Ventures is an early-stage venture capital fund powered by The Motley Fool's brand, investing approach, and communities. Launched in 2018 as a sister company of The Motley Fool, MFV invests in exceptional early-stage technology companies that use technology to drive a clear competitive advantage in their industry, with a particular focus on businesses that leverage finance, culture, people, and business processes. MFV operates as an independent legal entity, with all investment decisions made by its portfolio managers. Learn more at foolventures.com.