How CLEATUS Customers Recorded More Than $5B in Government Contract Wins
Every GovCon platform publishes a "contracts won" number. Almost none of them publish the rule that produced it. This article explains how CLEATUS measures government contract wins tied to the platform, what the figure includes, what it excludes, and where the measurement stops short of proving cause.
TL;DR
- The figure counts awards recorded by CLEATUS customers, not awards won by CLEATUS. An award is "tied to CLEATUS" when the recipient's SAM Unique Entity ID (UEI) belongs to a customer account and the award's period of performance began while that company was a customer, or within twelve months after it stopped being one.
- The reporting cutoff is September 8, 2026. The window runs from each customer's own subscription start through the cutoff, so no award from before a customer joined is in the total. Awards with a later start date are recorded on the date the government publishes them.
- Three sources feed the number: federal obligations from USAspending.gov, award notices from SAM.gov, and past performance that customers enter themselves. We report each one separately below, because they mean different things.
- Ceilings are not obligations. Multiple-award vehicles publish a shared ceiling, and we treat those seats as ceilings rather than revenue.
- A small number of large accounts drive most of the dollars. The typical customer's record is far smaller than the headline suggests, and we describe what a typical one looks like.
- CLEATUS contributed discovery, analysis, and proposal work on a measurable subset. We publish the subset, not a claim that the platform caused every award. Auto Capture and the AI Proposal Suite are the two features most often on the record.
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What the $5B represents
The number on our homepage is a sum of government awards whose recipients are CLEATUS customers. That sentence does a lot of work, so here is each part of it.
A customer is an account that has held a paid or trial CLEATUS subscription at any point. Cancelled customers count for the awards that started while they were subscribed, and for awards that started within twelve months after they left, because a proposal submitted during a subscription is typically awarded and begins performance months later. Awards that start later than that are excluded, even when the company was once a customer. Accounts that never started a trial do not count, even when their award history is in our database.
An award is a record in the CLEATUS awards table with a dollar value attached. Most of these come from public federal data. Some come from the customer. The next section separates them.
Tied to CLEATUS means two things and only two things. First, the recipient's UEI is registered on the customer's CLEATUS profile, so the award is theirs and not a namesake's. Second, the award's period of performance started inside that customer's window: on or after the day their subscription began, and no later than twelve months after it ended. An award that started before the customer joined is their history, not a win we can associate with the platform, and it is excluded. So is an award that started more than a year after they left.
Under that rule, as of the September 8, 2026 cutoff, the customer base had recorded more than $5B in qualifying awards. The rest of this article explains how that total is built and what it does not prove.
How we calculated it
Reporting period and cutoff
The reporting window is per customer. It opens on the day each customer's subscription began, closes twelve months after the subscription ended for customers who have left, and closes at the cutoff on September 8, 2026 for everyone. We read the production database once at the cutoff and archive that read. The next published refresh will state its own cutoff date. A figure without a date next to it is not one we publish.
Awards are dated by period-of-performance start, not by the date the government posted them. This matters at the edges. Some awards in the total have a start date after the cutoff, because the agency published the award before performance begins. They are included, since the award decision has been made and published. They are a small share of the total.
Award sources
Three sources feed the awards table, and the table does not label which is which, so we classify each record by its shape.
USAspending.gov obligations. Every night CLEATUS syncs awards for each customer's UEI from USAspending.gov, the federal spending database maintained by the Treasury from Federal Procurement Data System (FPDS) records. These carry a dollar value that means one specific thing: the amount the government has obligated to the contractor to date. Delivery orders, purchase orders, blanket purchase agreement calls, and definitive contracts all arrive this way. This is the strictest source in the total. It is also the smaller of the two public sources by dollars, because obligations accumulate over years while ceilings are published on day one.
SAM.gov award notices. When an agency posts an award notice on SAM.gov, CLEATUS matches the awardee's UEI to customer profiles and records the award at the value stated in the notice. For a single-award contract, that value is the contract value. For a multiple-award indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity (IDIQ) contract, a multiple award task order contract (MATOC), or a governmentwide acquisition contract, the notice states a ceiling shared by every awardee. SAM.gov notices are the larger source by dollars, and shared-ceiling vehicles are a large part of that.
Customer-entered past performance. Customers can add past performance to their profile by hand, including commercial, state, local, and subcontract work. We use these entries to improve recommendations and proposal drafts. They are unverified, so they do not count toward the figure. Some of them also describe private commercial work rather than government awards, which is a second reason to keep them out.
The rule that connects each award to CLEATUS
One join, two conditions. The award's recipient UEI must match a UEI on a customer profile, and the award's start date must fall inside that customer's subscription window, including the twelve months after a cancellation. Nothing in the rule asks whether the customer found the opportunity in CLEATUS, analyzed it there, or drafted the proposal there. That is deliberate. Those facts are recorded for many awards, and we report them in the "What CLEATUS contributed" section, but they are not what qualifies an award for the total.
Ceilings, obligations, options, modifications, task orders, and joint ventures
Ceilings appear only through SAM.gov notices. When a notice describes a multiple-award vehicle, we count the customer's seat at the stated ceiling and label it as a ceiling. We do not divide a shared ceiling among awardees, because the government does not publish the split, and we do not present a ceiling as revenue.
Obligations appear through USAspending.gov and are counted as published. They include exercised options and funded modifications, because USAspending reports the running total.
Task orders placed under a vehicle are counted as obligations on the order, not as a second copy of the vehicle ceiling.
Joint ventures hold their own UEI. An award to a joint venture counts only when the joint venture itself is a customer. It does not count toward a member firm's total.
Subcontracts and subgrants reported through USAspending subaward filings count and are reported as a separate line. They are a small share of the total.
Deduplication
Awards can enter the table twice, most often when the same contract is captured once from a SAM.gov award notice and once from USAspending.gov, or twice from SAM.gov under two notice types. We collapse records that share an account and a contract number, and when no contract number is present, records that share an account, an amount, and the same opening text of the description. Where a contract appears at both its ceiling and its obligation, one copy survives. On the cutoff date that removed a few percent of the gross sum. We also check for the same award id attached to two accounts and for the same UEI registered on two accounts. Both are rare and both are resolved to a single copy.
Results by customer segment
Segment labels come from each customer's SAM.gov registration. "Small" means any small business type, an 8(a) certification, or a HUBZone certification on the registration.
Other-than-small firms hold the majority of the dollars. Nearly all of it comes through seats on multiple-award vehicles for engineering, construction, and professional services, which is where the largest ceilings live. These are established primes that use CLEATUS to run intake, shredding, and pipeline reporting for teams that already have a formal gate process.
Small businesses hold a substantial minority of the dollars and the majority of the awards. Their records are built from definitive contracts, delivery orders, blanket purchase agreement calls, and set-aside IDIQ seats. Veteran-owned and service-disabled veteran-owned firms are the most common socioeconomic statuses in this group, followed by women-owned, 8(a), and HUBZone certified firms. Many hold more than one status.
A handful of public bodies and educational institutions appear through grants and are a rounding error in the total.
The distribution is steep. A few customers recorded nine-figure totals during the window. Most recorded under $1M, and the typical customer recorded a mid six-figure total. That typical record is the number most readers should compare themselves to. It describes a company that won one or two definitive contracts or a handful of delivery orders during its first year on the platform. Cuadrant is the published version of that path: a hardware supplier with no proposal staff that turned a one-day Air National Guard RFQ into a submission-ready quote in under three hours and won its first federal prime award within ten days of joining.
Three customer examples
These profiles are descriptive. We do not name the companies, and we do not pair an exact award amount with an agency or vehicle, because that pairing is enough to identify a contractor in public data.
A service-disabled veteran-owned staffing and safety services firm. The company joined in late 2025 and built a deep pipeline concentrated on the regional contracting offices of a single federal health agency. It drafted its proposals in the AI Proposal Suite and tracked its wins on the pipeline board. Several awards in its record match solicitations that were in its CLEATUS pipeline before award, each in the low seven figures, and all of them came from the same agency's network contracting offices.
A service-disabled veteran-owned moving and logistics company. A small firm that joined in mid-2025. Its record holds several awards that match pursuits in its CLEATUS pipeline, from a defense installation, a land management bureau, and a national park unit. They range from a small purchase order to a multi-year IDIQ for furniture moving on a single base. The pattern is the one small primes should expect: several small awards from the same buyers, compounding into a past-performance record that supports a larger bid.
A large engineering and infrastructure firm. The company joined in early 2026 and recorded a large number of awards during its subscription, most of them seats on multiple-award architect-engineer vehicles published on SAM.gov. Counted at ceiling, its record is a large share of the headline. Counted at obligation, the USAspending figure for the same period is a small fraction of that. This one account is the clearest illustration of why the ceiling and obligation lines are reported separately, and why a single company can move the headline by hundreds of millions in either direction.
What CLEATUS contributed
We can show contribution at four levels of strictness, and the population shrinks at each step. That is the honest shape of attribution data, and we would rather describe it than imply the top line.
Recorded. The award started after the customer joined. This is the qualifying rule, and it is the whole total.
Active pipeline. The customer tracked opportunities in CLEATUS during the window. Most of the dollar total belongs to customers who did.
Proposal work. The customer generated proposals in the AI Proposal Suite. A substantial share of the dollar total belongs to customers who did.
Opportunity on record. The awarded solicitation itself was in that customer's CLEATUS pipeline before the award. This is the strictest test, and it confirms a smaller share of the total.
The strictest level undercounts. A USAspending obligation record rarely carries the SAM.gov solicitation number, so an award can sit in a customer's pipeline and still fail the match. What the four levels show together is that discovery, bid/no-bid analysis, and proposal work happened on the platform for a meaningful part of the total, and that the rest was won by customers who used CLEATUS for other parts of their capture process, or for none of it on that particular pursuit.
For the customers in the "Proposal work" row, the pattern in the published case studies holds: D2 Government Solutions reports 75% faster discovery and three times the proposal volume, and MST Maritime Management went from three proposals a month to more than ten. Throughput is the contribution we can measure directly. Win rate on any single bid is not, because the evaluation happens inside the agency.
Methodology and limitations
The figure is a record, not a causal claim. We say "recorded by CLEATUS customers" and "tied to CLEATUS." We do not say "won with CLEATUS" for the aggregate, because the qualifying rule does not test platform usage on the award.
Ceilings inflate, obligations lag. A multiple-award seat is real and worth having, but its ceiling is not money in the bank. Obligations are money in the bank, but they trail the award decision by years. Neither alone describes what a customer won this year, so we keep the two apart in our records and describe the mix rather than quote a ceiling as revenue.
Customer-entered data is unverified. We exclude it from the qualifying total. When we have found entries that describe work done for another employer, or commercial projects, we have hidden them from the record, and hidden entries are excluded.
Concentration means the number is sensitive to a few accounts. A small number of customers drive most of the total. One large signup or one large cancellation does not change the total, because cancelled customers stay in it, but one large customer's award history can move it by hundreds of millions of dollars.
Classification is a heuristic. The awards table does not label its source, so we classify each record by its type fields and description. The classification is published with the ledger so it can be checked.
The window is short. Two years of platform history is not long enough to see the full obligation curve on awards made in the first year. The obligation line will grow for years on awards already in the total.
State and local wins are undercounted. The public sources behind the figure are federal. State, local, and education buyers rarely publish a UEI with an award, so those wins reach the total only when the buyer's record can be matched to a customer by name, which we do not yet do at scale. The figure leans federal for that reason, not because customers stop at the federal market.
What we will not do. We will not count awards to companies that never subscribed. We will not count a customer's history from before they joined. We will not divide a shared ceiling among awardees by guesswork. And we will not publish a refreshed figure without the cutoff date and the rules that produced it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Your own award record is the first thing CLEATUS builds when you connect a UEI. If you want to see how it reads, and what the Market Intelligence tools do with it, the fastest route is a working session on your data.
Further Reading
- Agentic AI in Government Contracting
- AI-Driven Bid/No-Bid Decisions
- Agentic AI for GovCon Capture Management in 2026
- Why Small Businesses Struggle With GovCon