How four college friends turned procurement frustrations into a venture-backed defense tech platform
About Nick LaRovere
Nick is the CEO and Co-founder of Pryzm. As a software engineer at Palantir Technologies, Nick worked on both Gotham and Foundry platforms, gaining firsthand exposure to building federal contracting systems and understanding the critical intersection of technology and national security missions.
A graduate of Colby College, Nick’s experience selling Palantir’s solutions to DOD and three-letter agencies provided him with intimate knowledge of the procurement pain points that would eventually inspire Pryzm’s founding mission.
Nick is part of a core founding team of four Colby College grads, each of whom experienced the pain of government acquisition: Matt Hawkins (president & COO), Justin Deckert (chief growth officer), and David Istrati (chief technology officer).
About Pryzm
Pryzm emerged from a deceptively simple observation: government procurement was drowning in PDFs and Excel spreadsheets. What started as a document processing solution has evolved into a comprehensive capture and relationship mapping platform that serves the entire defense contracting ecosystem.
The product’s core function is transforming traditional capture processes through intelligent automation and visualization. Their “Orion constellations” feature allows users to map influence networks, parse opportunities, and understand organizational relationships in ways that replace traditional whiteboards and Figma diagrams with dynamic, data-driven insights.
Pryzm serves both commercial defense contractors seeking to win government business and government agencies looking to improve their procurement processes. This dual-market approach creates network effects that strengthen the platform’s value proposition for all users. Their recent Seed funding ($12M+ led by Andreessen Horowitz’s American Dynamism team) puts them on an accelerated path across both commercial and federal segments.
Key Takeaways
Solve Your Own Problem First: Pryzm’s founding story illustrates the power of building solutions to problems you’ve personally experienced. Pryzm built OCR and document processing capabilities first, then layered capture tools on top. This technical foundation allowed them to create “Orion constellations” - a specific solution for mapping influence networks that replaces traditional relationship tracking methods. These deep technical capabilities in their domain today serve as Pryzm’s competitive moat.
Marry the Pain, not the Product: The company’s evolution from document processing to capture tooling demonstrates the importance of remaining flexible as you discover where your technology creates the most value. When they realized their relationship mapping and opportunity parsing capabilities were more valuable than their original PDF extraction tool, they pivoted their business model toward the higher-value solution.
Timing is Everything: As Nick noted, “There is so much tailwind for acquisition reform right now.” Whether they knew that acquisition reform was coming when they started the company, or they hit timing gold, the reality is the current a bipartisan push for procurement modernization is the greatest gift in the fight against institutional inertia.
Tune out the Market Noise: Nick acknowledges the danger of getting distracted by “fads” and “shallow solutions” in the rapidly growing defense tech space. Their strategy of staying “squarely focused on the customer” and “the mission” rather than following trends has allowed them to build genuine value rather than chase market hype.
Treat compliance partners as force multipliers, not just vendors: Nick specifically called out SecondFront and Palantir FedStart as “excellent partners” rather than just service providers. There’s huge value in developing compliance and ATO partners who can accelerate your speed to market, and who can help build additional customer pipeline along the way.
Learn more about Pryzm: https://pryzm.io/
Follow Nick: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicholaslarovere/
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