Vultron is an AI-Native Operating System designed to help federal contractors accelerate and scale proposal development. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Vultron CEO Mac Liu to gain a deeper understanding of the company.
Mac Liu’s Background
What is Mac Liu’s background? Liu said:
“I’ve spent my entire career at the intersection of defense, applied AI and large-scale systems engineering.”
“Before founding Vultron, I was on the early team at Anduril, where I led autonomous defense systems deployed in the field. Prior to that, I built large-scale recommendation and retrieval systems at Robinhood and Google. That experience has shown me how intelligence is engineered, deployed and scaled, both in the private sector and in high-stakes federal environments.”
“That experience shapes how we approach everything at Vultron from how we build our AI to how we align it with real-world mission outcomes.”
Formation Of The Company
How did the idea for the company come together? Liu shared:
“The idea for Vultron was born out of necessity. I was deep in the federal space, trying to scale revenue as a defense contractor, and found myself stuck in the same bottlenecks over and over again. Manual processes, compliance complexity and resource constraints drove me to build an internal AI system to clone these parts of my job that were holding me back. As the system got smarter, I realized the problem wasn’t just mine and that every contractor scaling in the federal market was facing the same thing.”
“That’s when it clicked: we weren’t just solving a personal productivity problem, we were looking at a platform opportunity.”
“My role today is setting the vision and ensuring that everything we build is grounded in technical excellence, mission relevance and long-term leverage for our users.”
Favorite Memory
What has been your favorite memory working for the company so far? Liu reflected:
“One moment that stands out was hearing a customer describe Vultron as ‘the smartest person on their team.’”
“This was incredibly impactful. This was a seasoned federal growth leader who had decades of experience, and they were using Vultron not just as a tool, but as an embedded system helping them drive strategy, execute faster and win more.”
“That moment crystallized what we’re really building: not software, but intelligent infrastructure for how federal work gets done.”
Core Products
What are the company’s core products and features? Liu explained:
“Vultron is an intelligent operating system for federal growth. It’s built to automate and optimize end-to-end capture and proposal workflows across the entire federal lifecycle.”
“Core capabilities include opportunity triage, RFP parsing, strategy generation, teaming intelligence, compliance drafting and past performance mining, just to name a few.”
“But what sets us apart isn’t just the features, it’s that Vultron functions as an agentic system. It learns from your inputs, adapts to your domain and executes complex workflows autonomously. It’s like adding a high-performing team member that never sleeps.”
Challenges Faced
What challenges have Liu and the team faced in building the company? Liu acknowledged:
“GovTech is complex by design. One of the biggest challenges we’ve faced is the inertia of legacy systems and the skepticism that comes with introducing AI into high-compliance environments.”
“We overcame that by investing deeply in both product capability and user trust. That means precision tuning for federal use cases, aggressive quality assurance and showing—not telling—how the system performs under pressure.”
“We also designed Vultron to operate within the reality of the federal ecosystem, not abstract from it. That alignment builds trust faster and gets real results in production.”
Evolution Of The Company’s Technology
How has the company’s technology evolved since launching? Liu noted:
“We started with a simple premise: scale high-leverage work, not just automate checklists.”
“Since then, Vultron has evolved from a guided AI assistant into a fully agentic system. What used to require careful prompting now happens autonomously across entire workflows. Our platform can reason through ambiguity, take context-aware action and learn from feedback over time.”
“Behind the scenes, this required major investments in our proprietary stack including custom orchestration layers, retrieval infrastructure and compliance-aware reasoning engines. The result is a system that doesn’t just complete tasks, it drives outcomes.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones? Liu cited:
“A few big ones come to mind:
— Crossing 20 hours/week in time savings per user—a signal that we weren’t just incrementally improving workflows, we were transforming them.
— Winning multi-million-dollar federal bids powered by Vultron’s output—proof that the system could operate at the highest levels of federal contracting.
— Expanding use cases beyond growth teams—customers started deploying Vultron across operations, finance and compliance without us prompting it.”
“These weren’t just product milestones, they were validation of our thesis that AI can be embedded infrastructure, not a bolt-on layer.”
Customer Success Stories
When asking Liu about customer success stories, he highlighted:
“One of our early customers used Vultron to reengineer their entire capture and proposal process. Before Vultron, they had one person managing five to seven deals at a time. With Vultron, that same person scaled to managing 30+ with higher win rates.”
“Another contractor used Vultron to write an entire proposal section on past performance that they later told us helped tip the award in their favor. The kicker was that the AI pulled and structured that section automatically based on internal data.”
“We hear stories like that weekly, and they’re the best validation of the work we’re doing.”
Funding
When asking Liu about the company’s funding, he revealed:
“Yes—we recently announced our $22 million raise, including our Series A, led by Greycroft Ventures with participation from Craft Ventures, Long Journey Ventures and South Park Commons.”
“What’s meaningful about this round isn’t just the capital, it’s the caliber of belief behind it. Craft Ventures, co-founded by White House AI adviser David Sacks, backed the round because they see Vultron not just as a product, but as the category-defining platform for AI-driven federal growth.”
“That funding will accelerate our ability to serve the market at scale. We’re already working with a significant number of Fortune 500 enterprises and leading federal contractors across defense, aerospace and mission-critical sectors.”
“Demand has never been stronger, and we’re doubling down to meet it with deeper product investments, expanded R&D and a go-to-market strategy designed for scale.”
Total Addressable Market
What total addressable market (TAM) size is the company pursuing? Liu assessed:
“Our focus is the $700B+ U.S. federal contracting market. Within that, we’re building for the companies that want to win more bids, scale more efficiently and operate more intelligently.”
“But the real TAM isn’t just the spend, it’s the labor cost and lost opportunity from outdated systems. That’s a multi-trillion-dollar inefficiency, and AI is how we fix it.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates the company from its competition? Liu affirmed:
“Most GovTech tools focus on surface-level automation. We’re building intelligent systems.
Our biggest differentiators are:
1.) Agentic Execution: Vultron doesn’t just assist, it acts.
2.) Domain Specificity: purpose-built for federal workflows, not retrofitted.
3.) AI Fluency: we treat AI like infrastructure, not a checkbox.”
“We’re not trying to wrap a pretty UI around a foundation model. We’re building deep intelligence that operates with the same rigor and reliability you’d expect from your best team member.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of the company’s future goals? Liu emphasized:
“We’re building toward a future where Vultron becomes the operating layer for federal work.”
“That means expanding from growth and capture into all areas of federal operations including finance, compliance and even mission execution. Anywhere repetitive, high-stakes work exists, Vultron can help make it faster, smarter and more adaptive.”
“We’re also focused on partnerships with government directly, not just contractors, so that the intelligence layer exists across the entire ecosystem.”
Additional Thoughts
Any other topics you would like to discuss? Liu concluded:
“If there’s one thing I’d emphasize, it’s this: we’re at a tipping point.”
“AI won’t just improve federal contracting; it will redefine how federal work gets done.”
“The leaders who invest in intelligent systems today will define the standards for tomorrow. And the real shift won’t be in tools—it’ll be in how we think about work itself.”
“That’s the opportunity. That’s what Vultron is here to build.”
