Software and analytics firm Govini has joined the ranks of defense unicorns with a new investment that pushes the company’s valuation past $1 billion, the company announced Friday.
The $150 million investment by Bain Capital “is really, really exciting validation of the traction that we have in the market” of defense acquisition software, Tara Murphy Dougherty, Govini’s CEO, told reporters Friday.
Govini, which boasts a 300-person workforce and reported $100 million in revenue for fiscal 2025, joins other billion-dollar defense startups such as robot-boatmaker Saronic, Anduril, and Germany’s Helsing.
Murphy Dougherty said she plans to use the $150 million to hire technical experts in AI, data, and engineering.
“We basically went out to raise capital as a way to really step on the accelerator,” she said. “We’re going to hire like crazy, both in our Pittsburgh office across AI talent, data talent and engineering talent, as well as in our D.C. office, where we hire a lot of defense and national security experts. And we’re just going to try to go fast.”
Govini has recently landed several contracts for its Ark.ai platform, which is used to track and analyze supply chains down to raw materials, including Army and Defense Department-wide IDIQ contracts for supply chain analysis for undisclosed amounts and a slice of the similar government-wide $919 million SCRIPTS contract.
The company is part of the Army’s pioneering Next Generation Command and Control, or NGC2, program, a $99.6 million effort led by Anduril to prototype a new system for the 4th Infantry Division. Govini is working to introduce predictive logistic and replace a manual process.
“We have the Fourth Infantry Division, for example, in the United States Army that is using Ark to do things like track fires as they’re executed. So they’re tracking ammunition as it’s used automatically in the product, and then AI is creating forecasts of ongoing demand for that ammunition, and then automatically calculating resupply,” Murphy Dougherty said.
The platform is also being used at Navy Fleet Readiness Centers to track parts for ship maintenance. For example, one user flagged a subtier critical part supplier as a bankruptcy risk to program leaders after the Ark platform detected a “spike” in the supplier’s financial risk.
“What the Navy did with that is, they took that information to their prime. They said, ‘We’re concerned about this.’ The prime had no idea, and the Navy said…’go out and find a second supplier for this critical component, because we just don’t like the look of this risk.’ Six months after that happened, the company fired the CEO, and 12 months later, they declared bankruptcy.” The Navy’s program was unaffected, she said.
