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Motivate Ventures is excited to announce that its Fund II portfolio company Obviant has raised $7.1 million in combined Pre-Seed and Seed funding.
Motivate initially invested in Obviant in early 2023. The recent Seed round was led by Shield Capital, with participation from Motivate, A*, New Vista Capital, Aloft Venture Capital, and Underdog Labs.
The Motivate team has known Co-Founder and CEO Brendan Karp for several years from his time at TechNexus, where he invested in technology startups on behalf of large corporate partners and government agencies. While working on this project, Brendan realized the nightmare that is government budgeting and contracting. The frustrations associated with budget attribution uncertainty and lack of spend transparency and accountability were so painful that he decided to leave TechNexus to work on solving these headaches. Obviant was born, and Motivate was one of Brendan's first calls.
Even at the earliest stages of the business, we were impressed by Brendan's passion and enthusiasm to solve such a monumental challenge. Motivate made its initial investment in early 2023, and we worked closely with Brendan as he constructed his initial team and built v1 of the product.
Fast forward to today, Obviant is now an AI-powered data intelligence platform that brings real-time transparency and actionable insights to the U.S. Department of Defense acquisition, contracting, and budgeting process. By aggregating thousands of open-source documents, including DoD budget books, program reports, and Congressional records, Obviant provides a unified view of defense spending and strategic initiatives. This empowers defense contractors, prime integrators, government agencies, investors, and think tanks to make faster, smarter decisions powered by historically hidden and convoluted datasets.
With U.S. defense budgets approaching $1 trillion and growing demand for emerging technology solutions, Obviant equips stakeholders with mission-aligned intelligence at the speed of relevance. Using Obviant, leaders across industry and government can access real-time, actionable data, not guesswork or hand-built spreadsheets, to strengthen our national security.
Shield Capital's team is led by former DoD and defense industry experts; their strategic focus on early-stage companies developing AI, autonomy, cyber and space capabilities makes them a perfect partner for Obviant to accelerate its already impressive growth. Shield's Michael Brown, a former Defense Innovation Unit Director, remarked that Obviant addresses a critical industry challenge, a missing "single source of truth" by delivering precision insights into defense capabilities and spending across granular mission areas.
The new funding will accelerate hiring, deepen Obviant's AI capabilities, and expand its customer base, including defense startups, primes, agencies, and institutional investors, ushering in a new era of data-driven decision-making across the defense sector.
You can read more about Obviant on DefenseNews and Tectonic Defense. If you're interested in joining the Obviant team, check out their current open roles here.
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