Doubling down on Stotles - the future of procurement

We at Form are delighted to back the Stotles team again in their Series A, alongside Headline, Acton Capital, and Seedcamp. We’re adamant that the team is on the way to building the end-to-end software that companies selling to government can live in.

We first met John, Taj and Carsten back in 2022. We’ve worked in and around Government for long enough to understand just how much unnecessary friction there is in the procurement process. It prevents the public sector from fully benefitting from the latest innovation - if at all (!) - and it massively inhibits businesses that could benefit from working with government. A platform that builds a qualified pipeline; finds the right tenders; and qualifies those opportunities, just made sense.

But a lot has changed in the market since then.

Firstly, the government need for innovation has massively increased. Public debt across the UK, US and several other western economies spiked to over 100% of GDP during covid, and hasn’t returned to its pre-covid level. Radically re-thinking public services is absolutely necessary to bringing it down - that urgency is palpable in Number 10 and across Whitehall.

Secondly, the pace of tech advancements means the scope for improving the procurement process has sky-rocketed. Leveraging the rapid advancements in GenAI, Stotles can now create a first draft of a bid response that is tailored to a customer - and the quality of those drafts only improves as the tech advances as Stotles really gets to know their customer.

Both these market shifts have massively worked in Stotles’ favour - and the rapid progress they’ve made speaks for itself.

Since the seed round, they’ve been serving companies like Amazon Business, Salesforce, Vodafone, NEC Software, Palo Alto Networks, and Snowflake. On average, they’ve generated 4x qualified pipeline growth for their customers, and more than doubled their customers’ public sector contract win rate. They have built a product which both does a lot of the leg work on bid-writing specifically, while also solving many of the smaller problems along the broad workflow. This type of end-to-end product, with embedded GenAI, is exactly where we think sustainable value will be generated in this tech wave.

There’s so much more to come from this team, and we’re absolutely delighted, and privileged, to be supporting them on the journey.