OS AI Feature: 5 Emerging women-owned and women-led companies making headlines in 2023

To wrap up Women’s History month, this week we spotlight 5 more upstart women-owned and women-led companies that intend to make history, or at least change history. Banding together to support government in its efforts to award contracts to small business, specifically WOSBs, expect this team to share advice, intel, and to lean into each other where they can to secure needed partner support as they grow, win and work to influence future opportunities.

The competitive landscape for the Federal IT and Consulting sector is dynamic, with companies entering and exiting every day for a range of reasons. A goal for any Government and GovCon leader is to identify, establish relationships with, and support firms, and their respective leaders, which are positioned to serve as the next generation of highly successful GovCon small businesses.  

Every other week, we will highlight a handful of very small, but rapidly emerging businesses that are NEW (have been formed and/or launched in the last 30 months), and that should be on your radar. 

Here we spotlight a few of the newer companies that make up the founding membership of the Digital WOSB Alliance. 

All Women Leadership (AWL)  – Founded in 2019, this woman-owned and led consulting firm provides branding, communications, change and marketing strategies including to HHS through a recent contract to provide Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility Strategic Plan organizational change management, communications, and training strategy. Led by CEO and Founder Sara Thomas, who previously served as communications leader supporting VA, and COO Holly (Turner) Sydnor, a former communications specialist with the FDA, AWL was also among the latest companies admitted to the Digital Services Coalition and they were named to the Forbes Next 1000 list for 2021. That this company states it will donate 5% of all profits to organizations helping women ascend to leadership positions sheds some insight into the commitment and passion behind this team. 

For People  – Founded by Johanna Yi in 2020 with a mission to fight for the underserved and disadvantaged populations, For People is already making an impression. With experience that includes providing product management leadership, engineering leadership, data strategy development, data engineering, and data infrastructure development to CMS DataConnect and working on Medicaid and CHIP’s first human-centered design contract, supporting programs within CMS’s Medicaid and CHIP division that ingest, process, and analyze Medicaid data, this people first team will certainly have past performance and experience to share.  

Frasier Consulting – With capabilities in Digital Optimization, Content Creation, Strategic Communications Development and a focus on developing and implementing communication plans for federal and commercial organizations, we are betting the talents of this company, founded in 2021 by Jessica Frasier, have already been utilized. With her focus on UX, this team’s position as a founding member will be valuable in many ways. 

Skybrid Solutions  – Cofounded in 2021 by Alison Maher, who serves as President & CEO and Reuben Maher, Principal & COO, this WOSB is focused on delivering digital modernization capabilities. Citing experience providing a financial services client with an AWS-based high performance compute platform; for an intelligence client leveraging an agile approach to integrate the multi-source search platform cloud/data environment with commercial big data analytics; and for a national security client, leveraging COTS and open source technologies to implement a highly flexible data management module, this team brings a breadth and depth of both perspective and experience. 

Story Board – Founded in 2021 by Erin Grace and Mandy Mullins, Story Board has already helped multiple GovCon firms with their branding efforts to include NuAxis when it made a strategic shift to focus on customer experience and human-centered design within federal IT; VerticalApps when the team wanted to feature their core capability in a new, engaging format; and Digital WOSB Alliance partner Athena Federal Solutions, who wanted to hit the ground running from day one. We would expect many more Alliance partners will have the opportunity to engage with and benefit from this team and its B2B and B2G expertise. 

The Digital WOSB Alliance is founded by a small group of companies, including the few newer entrants noted above, and including others we have already spoken about, and several well-established and successful players. These latter include: 

• Bloom Works 
• Friends from the City  
• Bracari  
• Story Board  
• A1M Solutions 
• Amivero 
• Athena Federal Solutions 
• Bixal 
• C3 Tech 
• Pluribus Digital 
• Snowbird Agility

We expect great things from this dedicated group of women, individually through the companies they are leading, and collectively, through the Alliance. Interested in knowing more? Check out this recent interview here. Do you think your company should be part of the Alliance? Find out more here. https://www.digitalwosballiance.org/ 

Know a company we should spotlight? Do you lead or work for a company that is on the move? Contact us below and let us know.      

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