Conversation
Highlights

• From COVID Crisis to 10X Growth: How Exiger Turned Government Contracts Into Sustainable Scale

  The most interesting stories in B2B tech often emerge from crisis moments. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Exiger CEO Brandon Daniels shared how his team transformed a high-stakes government contract during COVID-19 into sustainable hypergrowth, taking their supply chain risk management platform from $10M to nearly $100M in ARR.

  The story begins in March 2020, when the federal government faced an unprecedented challenge: rapidly vetting thousands of potential vendors for critical medical supplies while avoiding fraud and ensuring supply chain integrity. As Brandon describes, “If we would vet 1000 vendors, there would be some cases where you’d have 1015, 2030 companies that you would exclude from the bid because they were so clearly unable and unprepared to deliver.”

  But the real value emerged when Exiger’s technology uncovered hidden supply chain vulnerabilities. Brandon shares a telling example: “When we built out the ability to see the supply chains…what we saw was that the fact that everyone was trying to create the same ventilator actually created an inherent dependency in the supply chain where they were all trying to get one part, which is called a solenoid valve…that solenoid valve that was attached to that commodity ventilator was only made by one company in the world.”

  This insight proved transformative. The government’s procurement teams could now see beyond surface-level vendor relationships to identify critical dependencies and vulnerabilities. As Brandon notes, “The second thing that it did for our business is it helped us to understand…we need to pierce the veil not only on who we’re buying from, but who they’re buying from and who they’re buying from so that we can see the problems that potentially sit at the bottom of the supply base.”

  The success created a network effect within government agencies. “Being a part of the Joint Acquisition Task Force, being a part of Operation Warp Speed, what it did was it set us apart from our competition,” Brandon explains. This led to broader adoption: “We ended up getting a contract through GSA to support a Federated Information Sharing, utilization or use case for our software across the federal government for all of supply chain risk management.”

  When the 2022 tech downturn hit, rather than pulling back on growth or burning cash, Exiger found a third way. Brandon details their approach: “We shrunk our pool of hosting companies, shrunk our pool of data providers, and actually spent more with each of them…We took our data vendors from 83 to 20, but bought more from the 20.”

  This consolidation created impressive unit economics. “Every net new dollar that Exiger adds in terms of software revenue equals 90 plus percent gross margin,” Brandon explains. They applied similar optimization across the business, including reducing translation costs from $3 million to $150,000 annually through smart caching and selective translation.

  The freed-up capital was immediately reinvested in growth. “We still got to EBITDA positive. But what we did is we took all of the benefits of these efficiency initiatives and stuck it into sales and marketing,” Brandon shares. This included doubling their sales and marketing team’s budget from $10M to $20M.

  For founders considering government contracts, Brandon emphasizes preparation: “You really have to have something that’s ready for deployment in order to go into the federal government just because there are a number of gates that they have from a security perspective or from a technical acceptance perspective.”

  He also highlights the importance of funding sources: “When you’re taking funding, when you’re looking at potential funding sources, you have to assess your foreign ownership, control and influence. Meaning focusing on Silicon Valley funds, focusing on US funds.”

  The story offers a masterclass in strategic growth: identify high-stakes opportunities that showcase your technology’s full capabilities, optimize ruthlessly for efficiency, and reinvest aggressively in growth. It’s a playbook that doesn’t require massive funding – just systematic execution and strategic patience.

  Looking ahead, Brandon sees an even bigger opportunity: “Our aspiration is to do good and to do well…we want to be the platform that returns that conversation to a question of just performance and price because that’s where they’re naturally skilled.”