Shovels, a startup on a mission to make government procurement radically more accessible for businesses, has raised $5 million in seed funding to simplify how companies find, understand, and win local government contracts. The round was led by Base10 Partners, with participation from other strategic investors committed to bringing innovation to public sector workflows.

Shovels is tapping into a long-ignored corner of enterprise sales - the $2 trillion state and local government market - by building the tools modern businesses need to identify opportunities, navigate compliance, and sell directly to the public sector.

Where traditional govtech solutions cater to bureaucrats, Shovels is flipping the script: they’re building for vendors, giving businesses the intelligence and automation they need to treat government like a viable, scalable customer segment.

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What Shovels Is Building

Shovels aggregates procurement data from tens of thousands of municipal, county, state, and school district sources, normalizes it, and turns it into actionable sales intelligence. Its core platform includes:

• A searchable RFP and bid database updated in real time
  
• Compliance automation to identify vendor eligibility per jurisdiction
  
• Bid coaching and win-rate analytics to guide strategic submissions
  
• Pipeline tracking tools tailored for longer, multi-touch government sales cycles
  
• Integrations with CRMs like Salesforce and HubSpot for sales team alignment
  

For a sales rep or founder looking to sell into the public sector, Shovels replaces chaos with clarity. And more importantly, it helps turn government into a repeatable channel - not just a lucky win.

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Why It Matters

Every year, tens of billions of dollars are allocated to city, county, school, and state government purchasing - but most startups, SMBs, and even mid-size vendors ignore the opportunity.

Why? Because local procurement is opaque, fragmented, and riddled with red tape. Each agency has its own platform, process, and policies. For a company trying to sell across multiple counties or states, the cost of compliance and sales overhead is simply too high.

Shovels sees the opportunity differently: aggregate, normalize, and automate the mess, then give vendors the clarity they need to treat government like any other strategic channel.

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Where Founders Can Learn from Shovels’ GTM Insight

This is where Shovels offers a huge lesson for other B2B and SaaS founders: sometimes, the best go-to-market isn't finding new customers - it’s making unreachable customers reachable.

Most SaaS companies focus on faster sales, not deeper access. Shovels focuses on distribution arbitrage - helping vendors unlock entire customer bases they’d written off as “too hard.”

Instead of spending millions on demand gen, Shovels is helping its customers unlock latent demand that already exists - in school districts, housing authorities, public utilities, and municipal governments.

That’s a strategic unlock many startups overlook: rather than chasing “hot” markets, go after cold markets with broken access. Build tools that bridge the gap - not just compete in the noise.

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Why This Market Is Huge - and Under-Served

Shovels is building in one of the biggest yet most misunderstood markets: state and local government procurement. And the timing couldn’t be better.

According to the National Association of State Budget Officers (NASBO):

• In 2024, U.S. state and local governments are expected to spend more than $3.1 trillion, with nearly $1.6 trillion addressable by private sector vendors
  
• Infrastructure, IT modernization, sustainability, education, and public health are all receiving record funding due to federal stimulus initiatives like the American Rescue Plan and IIJA
  
• The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) alone allocates $1.2 trillion through 2031, much of it administered at state and municipal levels
  

And yet, most companies ignore the government vertical entirely due to:

• Highly fragmented procurement systems (no central marketplace)
  
• Cumbersome RFP documentation and opaque requirements
  
• Lengthy timelines and limited internal bid-writing resources
  
• Uncertainty around eligibility, pricing, and award patterns
  

Shovels exists to solve all of this - and in doing so, unlocks a blue ocean of revenue for vendors that can navigate the maze.

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Who Shovels Is Built For

While traditional govtech targets procurement officers and bureaucrats, Shovels serves the supply side - the people trying to sell into public agencies.

Its customers include:

• B2B SaaS companies targeting school systems, municipalities, or state agencies
  
• Construction, infrastructure, and clean tech firms bidding on public works
  
• Professional services from HR to consulting to financial compliance
  
• Marketplaces and platforms offering multi-vendor products that qualify for cooperative purchasing
  

Instead of making vendors conform to government workflows, Shovels is helping governments meet businesses where they already operate - with sales teams, CRM tools, and deal cycles that work.

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What’s Next for Shovels?

With the fresh $5 million investment, Shovels is now focused on:

• Expanding bid coverage to all 50 U.S. states, including smaller townships and school districts
  
• Launching AI-powered bid-matching, helping vendors target opportunities by sector, region, or past success rate
  
• Growing partnerships with CRMs, public data platforms, and RFP authorship tools
  
• Building vendor education modules to support small businesses unfamiliar with public sector sales
  
• Hiring across sales, engineering, and compliance research
  

Their broader ambition? To become the default interface for government procurement - just like Stripe did for payments or Carta did for cap tables.

As U.S. government spending modernizes, and as cities seek more tech-native partners, Shovels is quietly becoming the infrastructure behind this next procurement revolution.