Govini

Govini, based in Arlington, Virginia, sells software for one of the least glamorous but most consequential parts of defence: the business of buying things. Its Ark platform is a suite of AI-enabled applications for defence acquisition, built on what the company calls a National Security Knowledge Graph and spanning supply chain, science and technology, production, logistics, sustainment and modernization. The pitch is speed — Govini cites cases where vendor assessments that took days shrink to hours, and where mapping a supplier’s sub-tier suppliers to find hidden program risk becomes a routine query rather than a research project. Ark holds FedRAMP High authorization and, the company says, an Impact Level 5 provisional authorization from the Defense Information Systems Agency.

The company has built a substantial contract base across the Pentagon. A five-year, $400 million single-award contract from the Office of the Chief Management Officer in 2019 gave the department broad access to its analytics; in April 2025 Govini was selected for a ten-year, $919 million Supply Chain Risk Illumination contract vehicle through the General Services Administration, making the Ark supply-chain application available government-wide. By late 2025 the firm reported passing $100 million in annual recurring revenue and raised a $150 million growth investment from Bain Capital that valued it above $1 billion, with roughly 300 employees. The bet behind that valuation is that the Pentagon’s procurement and supply-chain problems — long the province of spreadsheets and slow paperwork — are themselves a data problem that AI can attack.

Govini’s founder, Eric Gillespie, had stepped back from day-to-day leadership years earlier — Tara Murphy Dougherty was promoted to chief executive in January 2020 — and in November 2025 the company removed him from its board after his arrest in Pennsylvania on felony charges; the matter is before the courts.