Episode 437 of The VentureFizz Podcast features Nick LaRovere, CEO & Co-Founder of Pryzm.
It seems obvious that selling to the U.S. federal government is complex, especially if you aren’t one of the traditional defense prime contractors… but it doesn’t have to be that way. Pryzm is out to help companies level the playing field.
As I was preparing for this podcast, I learned about things like “J-Books” – the massive justification documents that outline the federal spending budget. While this budget information is public, these documents are notoriously long, dense, and difficult to navigate.
This seems like a logical use case for AI. But while many AI tools attempt to simply wrap public data to write proposals, Pryzm goes far deeper.
Founded by a team of Colby alumni with backgrounds at Palantir and Lockheed Martin, Pryzm has built an AI-powered command center. The platform unifies market intelligence, relationship insights, and real-time program awareness into a single, actionable view, making it the operating system for federal capture and acquisition.
The company recently closed a $12.2M seed funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) through its American Dynamism fund, with participation from XYZ Venture Capital, Amplify.LA, and Forum Ventures. Armed with IL5 and FedRAMP High authorizations, Pryzm is actively modernizing the federal procurement industry.
In this episode, we cover:
- Why the opportunity to build software for the U.S. government has never been greater, plus actionable advice for defense tech founders.
- Nick’s origin story: growing up in an entrepreneurial family, studying at Colby College, and finding his path into technology.
- A journey through his career and how he pivoted to product management, plus a great story about an internship at Tesla where he unexpectedly ended up installing windshields on the shop floor to hit Elon Musk’s aggressive production targets.
- What Nick learned during his pre-IPO years at Palantir.
- How the founding team at Pryzm came together, plus all the details on the platform and how Pryzm connects relationship networks with budget data.
- The crucial early-stage collaboration between sales and engineering to build a tight feedback loop for finding product-market fit.
- Advice on running a competitive, closed-loop fundraising process by leveraging existing investors, and mastering the art of storytelling which is so needed to win over top-tier VCs.
- And so much more!
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Transcript
Keith Cline: Nick, thanks so much for joining us.
Nick LaRovere: Yeah, excited to be here, Keith. Thank you.
Keith Cline: I’m excited to talk to you because we met during Boston Tech Week, which, before we hit the record button, we were talking about how great it was. I’m so grateful that Andreessen Horowitz—which is one of your investors—brought Tech Week to Boston. I used to look at it and wonder, Why are they doing it in New York, San Francisco, and LA? We need Boston! And they did it. It was amazing: over 660 events, all well-attended. Boston really showed up.
Opportunities like that create events where we meet, and I thought, You need to do the podcast. So I’m glad we’re finally here to record this.
Before we get into your background story and all the great work you’re doing with Pryzm—you’re building a company in an industry that people might be afraid to touch because it’s the government and the defense industry. It’s not standard B2B SaaS software; you’re dealing with a government entity, and that’s very complex. What advice would you have for an entrepreneur who is thinking of dipping their toes into the startup ecosystem of GovTech or defense tech?
Nick LaRovere: Definitely. Can I riff for a minute before answering that? There’s one thing I wanted to say about the intro. We hadn’t met, but I actually knew of you. I knew of you and VentureFizz probably three or four years ago, right as we were starting the company. I think there was an event—maybe TechCrunch Disrupt—and you ran one of the pieces of that event. I saw it and thought, Wow, this guy is very smart, he’s amplifying the community, and he cares about Boston.
You’ve been here, Boston’s been here, and the talent has been here. It’s awesome to see the momentum coming out of the city now. The components and pieces are all there; we just need to amplify and build that up. Boston and its community can go on to do amazing things. I just wanted to call that out because I remember seeing that and thinking, Maybe one day Keith and I will be able to chat. So this is pretty cool.
Shifting gears to your question about working with the government and the challenges in that space: when I was first at Palantir, one of the things that shocked me was being out in Palo Alto working on critical missions—stopping human trafficking, working with the Department of Defense to enable the warfighter, counterintelligence missions—and yet getting protested throughout the city. I remember going into the cafeteria and having protesters outside coming down on us for working with the government over policies they disagreed with.
In parallel, when working with the U.S. government back then, Palantir wasn’t necessarily taken seriously at first. They—along with companies like SpaceX—actually had to sue the U.S. government to be taken seriously and say, “Our bids as commercial contractors and new entrants should be evaluated fairly.”
Because of all that hard work from those who came before us, we are now in a radically different time period. The opportunity to work with the government has never been better. There is immense interest from the government itself; they’ve done the wargaming and scenarios and realized they need to harness the best of Silicon Valley and the technology sector to enable the warfighter, serve the public, get the most out of taxpayer dollars, and execute these critical missions.
There is a massive push right now to pull in commercial technologies. Venture capital sees that opportunity and is supporting it. Pryzm serves as a key accelerant for those tailwinds. We want to make it so that no matter who the company is or how much they’ve worked with the government before, if you have an amazing capability, you should have a chance to serve those opportunities, generate revenue, and deliver on those missions.
We’re building what I call the AI OS for federal and defense growth. It’s a full-stack data system that identifies where demand signals are coming from in the government and who your buyer is. We have a CRM under the hood that allows you to capture and pursue those opportunities, along with an AI assistant that pushes those initiatives forward even when you aren’t looking.
Keith Cline: I agree, the opportunity is now. With the shift to AI, it levels the playing field. The incumbents still do amazing work, but there’s an opportunity for the next generation—the next Palantir’s and Anduril’s—to build large, impactful companies.
Let’s dive into your background story. Where did you grow up, and what were you like as a kid?
Nick LaRovere: I grew up on the North Shore of Boston in Lynnfield, and my parents now live in Topsfield. Boston born and raised! I come from a close-knit Italian-American family—mom, dad, and two brothers.
To be candid, I was an incredibly stubborn kid, a total bookworm, and very opinionated. I definitely gave my parents their fair share of gray hairs! I was always questioning things, off in my own world, and going deep into cartoons, animation, or Harry Potter books.
I looked up to my dad immensely, and I still do. He was an entrepreneur who started a construction company that is still growing and doing really well around the greater Boston community. Even though I was pesky, my dad took me under his wing. My first jobs were working at his company, seeing all aspects of running a business—not just strategic decisions, but keeping the books, sweeping the shop floor, and cleaning up the yard.
He set a great example. He was in the office seven days a week. He taught me that if you’re the founder, you have to set the ethos and work harder than anybody else. I draw a ton of inspiration from him.
Keith Cline: That’s a common theme among founders. I have a similar story—my dad had a leather coat factory in the mill yard in Manchester, New Hampshire. When I was eight years old, I was cleaning ten thousand square feet of leather scraps, sewing machines, and bathrooms. It teaches you a strong work ethic.
Nick LaRovere: Absolutely. That’s the most important thing about being an entrepreneur. Luck matters, but you don’t need to be the brightest or most creative person—though those help. If you just don’t give up, persist, and do the dirty work, that will get you pretty far.
Keith Cline: Then you went off to Waterville, Maine—home of the Colby Mules. What brought you to Colby?
Nick LaRovere: Go Mules! What actually brought me to Colby was music. I’m a big musician—I play guitar, piano, and I sing. I was also a rapper throughout high school. When I was evaluating colleges, I loved Colby as a small school where I could pursue creative passions in close partnership with the faculty.
While I was there, I had one of my first real entrepreneurial pursuits. I started an a cappella group called Mayflower Chill. Colby is situated on a part of Waterville called Mayflower Hill, so the name was a play on words. I was singing a cappella on campus, but my co-founders and I were frustrated that there was no representation for hip-hop and R&B music. So we bucked convention and started our own group. It’s still around today doing cool music.
To me, that was a lightbulb moment: if you poke the universe and take some risks, you can make new things happen. It made me realize that maybe I could do that in other facets of my life too.
Keith Cline: Taking a quick detour—we’re going to talk about Pryzm being founded by Colby alumni. The NESCAC startup ecosystem doesn’t get showcased enough, so I want to highlight a few notable NESCAC founders.
Reed Hastings, founder of Netflix—do you know which NESCAC school he went to?
Nick LaRovere: Of course. They’re technically one of our rivals, so it pains me to say it, but Bowdoin! My younger brother went there as well, so I have a lot of respect for Bowdoin.
Keith Cline: Yep, Bowdoin! What about Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay?
Nick LaRovere: I did not know he was a NESCAC grad! Where did he go?
Keith Cline: Tufts! Medford’s own. And Brian Sharples, founder of HomeAway and chairman of GoDaddy, is a Colby grad. Mary Biggins, founder of MealPal and ClassPass, is also a Colby alum.
Nick LaRovere: Another great one from Colby is Jordan Nathan, who was in my class. He founded Caraway—they make very modern cookware and their business is doing incredibly well.
Keith Cline: I actually have Caraway in my kitchen! It’s an amazing product.
So after Colby, you went on to get your master’s degree at Johns Hopkins University. How did your career get started prior to launching Pryzm?
Nick LaRovere: My path was very nonlinear. When I first graduated, I didn’t really know what I wanted to do or how my skills applied, so I took a job on Wall Street as a financial services consultant at Ernst & Young.
It’s a great firm, but I didn’t find passion in the work. It was very hierarchical. At Colby, I had a lot of responsibility and was founding things, but at EY, I had to sit back and bide my time. I didn’t last a year because it wasn’t the right fit.
While trying to figure out my next step, I experimented with different paths after work every day. I thought I wanted to be a lawyer, so I bought LSAT prep books, but quickly realized law wasn’t for me. Then I tried writing short stories for a couple of weeks, but the spark faded.
However, during my senior spring at Colby, I had taken an introductory Python computer science class that blew my mind. During my year at EY, I kept doing little coding projects on the side. Eventually, it became my main hobby.
I left EY and joined Alarm.com in the DC area in a rotational leadership program, which led to a product manager role. But I kept running up against the wall of technical implementation. To be a great product leader, you need to understand the tech that underpins the product. I felt like I couldn’t tell people what to build if I didn’t know how to build it myself.
So, I started taking night classes in computer science at Johns Hopkins, right up the road from Alarm.com. That eventually led me to go full-time to complete my master’s degree in computer science to get that deep foundation in engineering, algorithms, and system architecture.
Keith Cline: You also had an internship at Tesla, and later worked at Palantir. What were those experiences like?
Nick LaRovere: While at Johns Hopkins, I realized that taking night classes would mean taking four or five years to finish the degree. I was impatient and wanted to build things, so I transitioned to full-time study and finished within a year.
During that time, I realized I wanted to do mission-driven work. Tesla is a hallmark of mission-driven work—accelerating the world’s transition to sustainable energy. I took a summer internship at Tesla in 2018 in Fremont, California.
It was one of the most eye-opening experiences of my life. Elon sets the benchmark for founders. That summer, Tesla had an audacious goal to produce 5,000 Model 3s a week and was falling well short at around 2,000 to 3,000. They were at risk of missing Wall Street estimates, so Elon created a company-wide surge.
He set up a massive tent behind the factory and pivoted all of our internships. I ended up on the makeshift assembly line inside the tent installing windshields on Teslas! Elon slept on the factory floor, put in the work, and we hit the target of 5,000 Model 3s in a month. It showed me that when you truly dedicate yourself to a goal, you can accomplish incredible feats.
Keith Cline: That is such a cool story—much better than a standard spreadsheet internship!
Nick LaRovere: I learned more in three or four months at Tesla than I had in years prior. It was a masterclass in building and problem-solving. When faced with a roadblock, instead of accepting defeat, you adapt—even if that means building a tent behind the factory to meet production targets.
After that came Palantir, which was another deeply mission-driven environment. Getting hired there was interesting because there weren’t many NESCAC grads at the company at the time. I cold-messaged the few alumni I could find on LinkedIn. One guy, Brian—who is still a mentor of mine today—agreed to take a call and put in a referral.
I joined Palantir in 2019 pre-IPO. It was an incredible time to be there. There were naysayers in the financial markets asking if the business model was sustainable, but leadership stuck to their vision. They believed in building a product-based company with a forward-deployed motion to bring AI and data infrastructure into enterprises and government agencies.
Being part of that rocket ship was invaluable. My responsibilities grew dramatically over three years, and it provided a network that I still rely on today.
Keith Cline: Let’s dive into Pryzm. In researching your company, I learned about terms like “J-Books”—the Justification Books for the federal budget released around February, March, and April. There’s roughly a trillion-dollar defense budget, and these massive J-Books detail the funding requests down to every dollar for procurement, research, development, testing, and evaluation.
For an outsider or a new entrant trying to break into government contracting, navigating these dense documents to find where spending is allocated sounds like a nightmare. This seems like a textbook use case for AI.
Nick LaRovere: You nailed it—that was a spot-on summary.
The J-Books are just one component of thousands of opaque, outdated, and siloed data sources across the federal government. These budget documents are hundreds of pages long in unstructured PDF format, and there are hundreds of them.
Extracting that data to understand where money is allocated is hard enough; tracing where that money flows downstream into actual contract awards across disparate systems is even harder.
A common misconception is that you can just dump these PDFs into a standard LLM. We’ve found that for rich, complex datasets, you need to apply an ontology—a structured set of object relationships—first. We perform opinionated, structured parsing of the data, and then supply that structured context to the LLM at query time.
Pryzm takes that unstructured budget data, ties it downstream to award histories, and connects it to organizational hierarchies. This allows a business development or growth team—even those without a background in defense contracting—to use our platform and AI agent to quickly identify demand signals, see which incumbents hold existing awards, and map out the key decision-makers.
Keith Cline: How did the company come together with your co-founders?
Nick LaRovere: My co-founders—Matt, Justin, David, and myself—were close friends from Colby. After graduation, we went our separate ways career-wise, but many of us ended up in big data and defense. Matt was at Lockheed Martin, and David was building big data pipelines at Viridian.
Having been at Palantir, I saw that much of the government ran on spreadsheets and PDFs despite multi-billion dollar budgets. When I left Palantir to start a company, the initial goal was to use LLMs to eliminate unstructured PDFs for government agencies.
However, as a new startup, we faced the reality of how hard it was to sell into the government. We didn’t know what SBIRs, STTRs, OTAs, or CSOs were, and we didn’t have the funding to hire expensive defense consultants or lobbyists. We had to build tools to help ourselves navigate the procurement landscape.
That was our eureka moment: the bigger immediate problem was enabling commercial tech companies to sell into the government effectively. Once we pivoted to building the operating system for federal growth, the trajectory of the company took off.
Keith Cline: When looking at your platform, beyond parsing budget data, you’re mapping relationships and connecting decision-makers—almost like a structured, intelligence-driven CRM for defense.
Nick LaRovere: Precisely. The core truth we’re building on is that structured public data isn’t the main bottleneck—unstructured relationship and agency data is.
If you’re waiting for a public RFP to drop on a government portal to reactively submit a proposal, you’ve already lost. Real business development in defense requires working your network, understanding past touchpoints, tracking public statements, and engaging decision-makers early so you can help shape the requirements before the solicitation is formally written.
Pryzm acts as a context engine. We ingest public budget data, integrate it with an organization’s internal unstructured CRM data and touchpoints, and give growth teams the exact context they need to take proactive action.
Keith Cline: You recently announced a $12.2 million Seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz, bringing your total funding to over $14 million. How did you manage to build such a robust platform so efficiently early on?
Nick LaRovere: When we started, we were heavily engineering-focused. For the first year, we built in a vacuum, barely raised money, and had almost no revenue because we weren’t talking to enough customers.
Things changed dramatically when I set aside a huge portion of my time to do founder-led sales. In the fall of 2023, I attended around 50 defense conferences across the country over a four-month period. Traveling, pitching, demoing, and getting direct customer feedback created a tight loop between sales and engineering.
Because the people selling the product were also building it, we could rapidly iterate based on actual customer pain points. Combined with modern developer tools and LLMs, our engineering team’s output was multiplied.
After establishing that traction, we raised our pre-seed round from XYZ Venture Capital and Amplify.LA, who were fantastic partners. That momentum positioned us to raise our Seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz.
Keith Cline: Raising from Andreessen Horowitz is a huge milestone. What was that fundraising process like, and what made it successful?
Nick LaRovere: The Seed round was a very tightly run process because I had already made every mistake in the book during earlier iterations!
First, we worked closely with our existing investors at XYZ. They saw our growth metrics firsthand, committed to follow-on funding, and actively advocated for us.
Second, we spent two to three months refining our narrative and deck before talking to new investors. In early-stage venture, investors look for team capability and a clear, de-risked narrative that shows a credible path to building a multi-billion dollar company in a large TAM.
When we officially opened the round on a Monday, we ran a competitive two-week process and signed the term sheet with a16z by the following week. Keeping the fundraising window short is critical because every day spent fundraising is a day you aren’t talking to customers or building product.
Keith Cline: How important is mastering storytelling for a founder?
Nick LaRovere: It’s immense. Along with work ethic, storytelling is one of the most vital traits a founder can have. As an individual founder, there is a limit to what you can execute alone. If you can articulate a clear narrative and galvanize people around a mission, you can recruit world-class talent, win over top investors, and convince early customers to take a chance on your vision.
Keith Cline: What’s next for Pryzm in terms of hiring and expansion?
Nick LaRovere: Scale and hiring! We’re actively recruiting top talent across software engineering, product, and go-to-market roles. Our headquarters is in downtown Boston, and we also have offices in New York City and Washington, D.C. If you are passionate about getting cutting-edge technology into the hands of warfighters and public servants, we want to hear from you.
Keith Cline: What are three apps you can’t live without—excluding Slack, email, or calendar?
Nick LaRovere:
- Spotify: I love exploring music, including Japanese City Pop, which is my go-to coding music.
- Cursor: An incredible AI-powered code editor that acts as an assistant for writing software.
- Sublime Text: A lightweight, minimalist text editor. It’s great for quickly jotting down notes and serves as a reminder that simple, clean user experiences often win.
Keith Cline: A quick shout-out to Spotify: the engine behind their music recommendation algorithms originated from The Echo Nest, an MIT Media Lab spinout right here in Boston that Spotify acquired years ago!
Nick LaRovere: That’s awesome! The early work on music recommendation and embeddings paved the way for modern vector search and LLM context models. It’s great to know that had Boston roots.
Keith Cline: Are there any specific books or podcasts you recommend to entrepreneurs?
Nick LaRovere: On the business side, Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson. Reading that biography was actually what inspired me to take my first computer science class at Colby. It reframed tech from being clunky software into a medium for building delightful, purpose-driven products.
For a fun wildcard pick: The History of Rome podcast by Mike Duncan. I’m fascinated by ancient Roman history. While it’s not a standard business podcast, the leadership dynamics, institutional challenges, and decision-making patterns throughout Roman history offer interesting parables for founders today.
Keith Cline: What do you like to do for fun when you’re not working?
Nick LaRovere: Building Pryzm consumes most of my time because I genuinely love it. But to unwind at the end of the day, I’m a gamer. Right now, I’m playing retro Pokémon games on a refurbished Nintendo DS. It’s the perfect way to turn my brain off before sleep!
Keith Cline: Nick, thanks so much for taking the time to share your story, the mission behind Pryzm, and your advice for founders.
Nick LaRovere: Thanks for having me on, Keith. Absolute pleasure!