Stotles has created a single platform for private sector companies to grow their revenue in the public sector in the new age of government efficiency. Founded in 2020 by London Business School MBA alumni John Witt, Taj Kamranpour and Carsten Schaltz (MBA 2019), and having taken part in the LBS Incubator, Stotles is on a mission to help governments and businesses work better, together. The company has just raised $13 million in Series A funding, led by Headline and Action, with support from returning investors Form Ventures and Seedcamp. The funding marks a pivotal step in Stotles’ goal to become the operating system for doing business with the government.
Taj Kamranpour, Stotles’ Co-Founder and COO, shares the challenges that selling to the public sector presents to suppliers in the new age of government efficiency, what Stotles is doing to partner with suppliers to succeed through the challenges, and how not accepting things as “too difficult” is a winning strategy for startups and their customers alike.
The public sector problem
At Stotles, we help suppliers navigate shifting government policies, complex procurement processes and unlock better outcomes for the public sector.
While many startups chase fast-moving markets, we deliberately chose a different path: focusing on one of the world’s largest, slowest, and most underserved markets – the public sector. It’s a space full of potential, but also immense friction. We saw that not as a limitation, but as a real opportunity.
We hear it all the time: “The public sector is too difficult to sell to.” Bureaucratic. Outdated. It’s slow. It’s hard to onboard new technology. Strategies and budgets change constantly.
These are all things we hear every day; from taxpayers, from the people working within public institutions, and especially from private sector suppliers.
And while some of these things may be true, we don’t believe in simply accepting them as the way things are. In fact, we exist to prove “the public sector is too difficult” is a myth worth challenging.
The public sector spends over £400 billion annually on procurement from private sector suppliers in the UK alone, and over $13 trillion worldwide. The opportunity is huge, but the market remains hard to access.
Procurement in the public sector is complex, fragmented and difficult to navigate. Despite the sheer size of the opportunity, suppliers struggle to build meaningful relationships with buyers.
On the supplier side, commercial teams face disconnected workflows, mountains of data, unqualified opportunities, inefficient processes, and painful collaboration.
It’s reactive, disjointed, and costly. For many suppliers, the wins feel few and far between.
And just when it feels it can’t get any harder, governments are changing the way they buy.
As John Witt, my Co-Founder and CEO of Stotles, told EU-Startups in May, “Governments everywhere are thinking differently about what and how they buy. We’re seeing changes in the UK and US public sector markets towards efficiency and cost-cutting; with both the Labour government’s policies to cut the cost of government operations and the creation of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) respectively. The market is evolving, and businesses who stand still are being left behind.”
The age of government efficiency
In 2024 and 2025, we’ve seen a global shift in government strategy towards efficiency. In the post-COVID-19 world, governments are navigating tough economic constraints and rising public expectations for better services which ultimately makes selling more challenging for suppliers.
Budgets are tightening. Expectations are rising. The focus is on efficiency and cost-saving. From the UK to the US and beyond, governments are demanding more for less – and suppliers are caught in the middle.
In practice, this looks like the UK Labour Government initiating a reform agenda aimed at enhancing public sector efficiency, reducing costs, and modernising operations through the integration of artificial intelligence (AI), automation and data-led decision-making. An example of this is the UK Government’s AI Opportunities Action Plan, released in January 2025, which lays out a strategy for embedding AI across public services.
When it comes to choosing a supplier, buyers are seriously considering the power of AI and other emerging technologies to deliver greater returns on investment, cost and time efficiency, and social value.
Right now, businesses selling to the public sector are delivering high-quality services at a lower cost. Suppliers must set themselves apart from their competitors early in the buying process to ensure that they are considered in the equation as buyers develop new efficiency strategies.
Meanwhile, in the US, the second Trump administration launched the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in January 2025 with objectives like modernising IT, boosting productivity, cutting excess regulations, bureaucracy and wasteful spending.
Public and expert opinions on DOGE have been mixed. Supporters argue that it’s a necessary push for better use of taxpayer money, while critics raise concerns about the growing influence of private individuals and well-connected suppliers on government operations.
However, critiques about favouritism in public sector procurement – especially toward incumbents and insiders – are nothing new. We know it’s a common challenge. And we know that to win a contract, suppliers have to outperform those existing relationships.
These initiatives are a clear signal that, on both sides of the Atlantic, governments want better outcomes, delivered faster, and for less. Contracts are becoming more competitive, and procurement teams are asking tough questions about value, delivery, and impact. Suppliers who can’t show real impact and ROI – especially across cost, efficiency, or tech enablement – will get squeezed out.
But for those who can? There’s a real opportunity to grow, scale, and shape the future of public service delivery if they have the right public sector strategy and sales engine in place.
That’s where Stotles comes in.
The public sector isn’t “too difficult”
We know selling to the government isn’t easy. But, the suppliers who are staking their claim to part with this $13 trillion global market are the ones who don’t let this faze them.
These are the suppliers who approach government efficiency strategies and entrenched incumbent relationships with clarity, focus and a plan, to grow their revenue. They’re not the ones saying, “The public sector is too difficult to sell to.” They are the ones doing something about it.
And they’re the ones we partner with at Stotles.
Like our customers, we reject the notion that the public sector is “too difficult”. Rather, we believe that this market has been accepted as difficult, and overlooked, for too long.
As founders, we’ve all experienced firsthand how complex and inefficient public procurement can be. That shared frustration is what led us to this mission: to improve how the world’s largest purchasing organisation operates, with an impact that spans from government departments to everyday taxpayers.
Despite public sector spending growing by over $1.1 trillion every year, we’ve seen the procurement software space remain remarkably underserved and overlooked. The market is split between outdated tender trackers, generic market intelligence platforms, and point solutions like AI bid-writing tools.
That’s why in May 2025, following our Series A raise, we relaunched our platform with a clear ambition: to become the single platform to grow suppliers’ public sector revenue.
Unlike anything else in the market, Stotles, looks at the entire commercial process – from shaping strategy and building a qualified pipeline, to finding the right tenders, qualifying them, and writing the first draft of a bid. We’ve designed our product to help suppliers tackle every challenge that comes with selling to the government.
We’ve embedded AI to enhance decision-making at every stage of the sales cycle, so our customers can stay focused on serious revenue opportunities. Stotles AI analyses millions of government data points and uses a bespoke algorithm to size suppliers’ total addressable markets (TAM), build target account lists, identify early buying signals, and show businesses only the most relevant opportunities.
Suppliers can easily find connections between opportunities, buyers’ procurement histories, competitor relationships, and potential partners, to enrich them with additional information that would have taken hours to find across thousands of portals without using our platform.
And when it comes to live tenders, Stotles AI also can qualify whether companies should bid on them. This stops suppliers from wasting time on opportunities they won’t win and saves time by using AI to generate drafts of bids companies choose to pursue.
We’ve built our platform, and our brand, specifically for the realities of the public sector sales. Because we believe that while selling to government is challenging, it doesn’t have to be a black box. When supplies are properly equipped, they can win more, grow their revenue and make a bigger impact.
Lessons from doing what others don’t
For us, building Stotles has never just been about software.
From day one, our ambition was to challenge long-held assumptions: that public procurement is too complex, too political, or too resistant to change to be worth innovating around.
We started this company because we believed the opposite: that if we could unlock access, drive competition, and empower suppliers, we wouldn’t just unlock commercial growth but also improve how governments serve people.
Over the last five years, we’ve learned that change in this market doesn’t happen overnight. It takes persistence, trust, and the willingness to work through complexity. Our customers, the suppliers who choose to compete in this space, are proving that an approach that responds to difficulty leads to real results.
We’re still early in our journey. Our Series A funding gives us the tools to deepen our product, expand our reach, and double down on our mission. We know the landscape will keep shifting, through political cycles, policy changes, and fiscal pressure, but we’re building a company based on the very foundation of adapting.
So, to our fellow entrepreneurs: don’t chase what’s easy. Go after the problems that are overlooked, accepted or dismissed as too hard. Look for markets where the pain is real, the players are underserved and possibly feeling defeated, and the potential is transformative-then go all in.
Because if there’s one thing our journey so far has proven, it’s this:
When you stop accepting “too difficult,” that’s when the real work, and the real opportunity, begins.
And for us at Stotles, it’s only just beginning.