A Boston Tech Conference Leads to a Colby-Connected Startup
A group of former and current students is building an AI-based company to bring transparency to the federal budget process
Two Colby alumni and one current student are betting big on the idea that AI technology can transform how technology companies collaborate with the government on complex problems like national security.
The startup they founded to do that, Pryzm, appears to be proving them right. The company aims to make it easier for defense startups and other companies to cut through bureaucratic red tape to bid on and win government contracts. They have a growing roster of customers and last August raised $2 million from investors in a robust pre-seed round, the first important funding stage for new enterprises.
Cofounders Nick LaRovere ’15, Matt Hawkins ’17, and David Istrati ’26 are stoked about the present and thrilled for the future of Pryzm. There are now nine full-time employees working out of their Boston office, including Justin Deckert ’15, who has been with the company from the beginning, serving as its chief business officer.
They attribute their good feelings to their Mayflower Hill roots and the multifaceted education they found there.
“We’re a really close Colby family. I do think the trust that was required to start this company was built when we were working together on the Hill,” said Hawkins, a physics major and Pryzm’s chief operating officer. “And, of course, we’ve got this liberal arts background, which allows us to think really critically about these types of problems.”
Identifying a problem
The idea for Pryzm emerged from the founders’ firsthand experiences in the defense technology world, where they saw how complicated and fragmented the process of working with the federal government had become.
It’s also an extremely valuable endeavor. According to the U.S. Department of Defense, the department’s 2023 budget was $816 billion, with contracts for products and services making up just over half of that sum.
Hawkins was a program manager at Lockheed Martin, a multinational aerospace company that is the largest single contractor for the U.S. Department of Defense. LaRovere, an economics major at Colby and Pryzm’s chief executive officer, was previously a software engineer at Palantir Technologies, a company known for building advanced data integration platforms for the Department of Defense and other clients.
As they kept in touch after graduation, the cofounders shared two parallel, growing concerns. First, as the international security environment grew more tense, could the U.S. move fast enough to deter future aggression and safeguard global stability? Second, they worried whether the country could guide its innovation and financial resources efficiently enough to tackle other urgent challenges like climate change and infrastructure improvement.
“America has the most robust commercial innovation economy in the world. It helped to end two world wars and power decades of prosperity,” Hawkins said. “But today, navigating the federal bureaucracy on all sides has become one of the biggest barriers to making progress—whether in national security or any other complex civilization problem that requires collaboration between government and industry.”
Together, their experiences gave them a clear view of the obstacles facing technology companies and government offices.
“There’s a lot of red tape, and it all comes down to information asymmetry,” LaRovere said. “Important pieces of information are scattered across different systems and agencies. That makes it especially hard for innovators to figure out where they fit—or even where to start.”
Finding a solution
Pryzm tries to ease that through its data intelligence platform that pulls together many different sources of government contracting information. The intuitive interface and AI technology they have built into the platform simplify the process so that people and companies can find exactly what they need. After that, the company has developed a suite of tools to help clients capture and win government contracts, or what they call a “customer relationship management system within a data intelligence tool.”
“Just surfacing data is not enough in the business world or in the government world,” Hawkins said. “It’s what you do with it. And solving these public sector problems, specifically regarding national security, is really about connecting the dots, which is a theme that comes up a lot in Pryzm’s products. Having that end-to-end workflow is what Pryzm does. It’s not just a data platform, and I think that’s why we’ve been really successful in the last year getting traction with customers.”
Starting a company
Hawkins and LaRovere first started hashing out the vision for a new enterprise in 2022 while on a ski trip together in Vermont. They built out an initial prototype for the Pryzm software and chose a name that evokes transparency and simplicity.
“The way a glass positioned properly in sunlight can break out the white light into its individual color bands is a metaphor for how we take the seemingly complex information environment of federal acquisition into a more streamlined and intuitive experience,” Hawkins said.
It wasn’t long before a chance encounter with Istrati became fateful for the nascent company.
It happened because Hawkins reached out to David Ding, Colby’s DavisConnects advisor for STEM professions, and told him about a tech conference in Boston that Colby students would be welcome to attend. “I’ve always liked being an engaged alum,” said Hawkins, who is now a mentor for the Halloran Lab for Entrepreneurship and a member of the Alumni Council.
Among the dozen students who came was Istrati, who wasn’t supposed to be there in the first place. The event was only for juniors and seniors, and Istrati was a first-year student.
“I was friends with one of the seniors, and they covered for me,” said Istrati, a computer science: AI and mathematics double major, who is currently taking a leave of absence from Colby to work for the company. “They said, ‘Oh, this guy’s a senior, don’t worry about him,’ and I got on the bus to go to Boston.”
He and a handful of Colby students had dinner after the conference with Hawkins and LaRovere, who talked about their project. Two days later, Istrati sent them an email that said, ‘‘Hey, I really like the product you guys are building, and I made a version of it,’” Hawkins recalled.
They looked at Istrati’s work and realized it was better than anything that they had done, and despite his youth, asked him if he wanted to work with them. Istrati became Pryzm’s chief technology officer.
“That was one of the smartest decisions we made as a company,” Hawkins said.
Adding a liberal arts perspective
Since then, the company has continued to grow and gain momentum, in part thanks to its Colby roots. There are multiple alumni in the circle of investors, and in addition to Deckert, a government major, the company also employs Yannik Büchi ’17, a biology and French studies double major, and Ray Wang ’26, a computer science: AI major. Büchi and Wang are software engineers, with Büchi developing a mobile app for the company and Wang working as a “really great intern” who helps to fill in the gaps, Hawkins said, adding that, “We even recruited our first Bowdoin Polar Bear recently.”
For Istrati, the company’s growth and mission have helped him explain to his parents why he has pivoted from school to be part of a startup.
“I definitely had to do a lot of convincing,” he said. “I think I made a really good pitch that this is important.”
All three feel that their liberal arts background has helped them with the work of creating Pryzm. Although their company sits squarely in the STEM field, the problem they are solving is not simply a STEM problem, and what they learned taking courses in fields like economics and philosophy matters.
“We are doing an engineering product, but I think one of the reasons why this hasn’t been solved before is because it is actually so interdisciplinary,” Hawkins said. “It’s not just solving the technical problem, but understanding how that technology fits into the domestic and foreign policy objectives of the U.S. government. It’s a very nonlinear problem space that does require the kind of multidisciplinary approach that only Colby can deliver.”
For LaRovere, there’s something else important to consider.
“I think we need and want liberal arts minds to engage upon this and to think critically about things like war,” he said. “We want these creative minds … so that ultimately we’re properly understanding the nuance and making critical, informed decisions.”
