How a terrain intelligence company accidentally built an AI tool for federal contracting

By Aneesh Hariharan, Founder — GeoGizmodo & GovRanker

Last year, my team at GeoGizmodo won a SBIR Phase 1 with the U.S. Air Force. We build predictive maintenance and terrain intelligence systems using machine learning. It was a huge milestone for us as a small business.

Then came the hard part: finding the next opportunity.

If you've ever tried to find federal contracts on SAM.gov, you know the drill. You log in, run a search, get 400 results. Half are expired. A quarter don't match your NAICS code. The rest require you to download a 47-page SOW just to figure out if it's even worth your time.

We were spending 5–8 hours a week just looking for opportunities. Not writing proposals. Not doing technical work. Just searching, filtering, reading, and deciding "nope, not a fit." For a small team, that's brutal.

One night I was reading through my third SOW of the evening — a 60-page document for what turned out to be a janitorial services contract that had nothing to do with us. It showed up in our search because it mentioned "predictive maintenance" once in the context of HVAC systems.

That was the moment I thought: we literally build AI systems for a living. Why are we doing this manually?

What started as an internal tool quickly became something bigger. We called it GovRanker. The idea was simple: what if an AI could do what we were doing manually, but in minutes instead of hours?

Nothing and everything. GeoGizmodo's core is geospatial AI and predictive analytics. We process satellite imagery, build ML models for terrain classification, and predict equipment failures for military vehicles. But the skills that let us build those systems — processing large datasets, building scoring algorithms, training models to find patterns in noise — are exactly what you need to solve the SAM.gov problem. Federal opportunity data is just another dataset. Matching companies to contracts is just another classification problem.

This is our first product launch. It came from our own pain, built with the same AI capabilities we use for defense work.

We built this for ourselves, but we realized every small business doing federal work has the same problem. The big primes have dedicated BD teams with 10 people scanning SAM.gov all day. Small businesses have one person doing it between actual project work. That's not a fair fight. We think AI can level it.

If your team spends too much time on SAM.gov and not enough time writing winning proposals, give it a look. Enter your company URL, let the AI do its thing, and see what it finds.

Two free searches, no credit card required.

▶ Watch the 3-minute demo on YouTube