After meeting during Northeastern’s Semester In Silicon Valley program, these grads started a startup that uses AI to help businesses answer RFPs
When a business needs to hire a contractor, it often sends out a request for proposal, otherwise known as an RFP, an industry practice with roots dating to the Industrial Revolution.
It’s a standardized method for companies to solicit vendors for a specific job or service.
While companies have been using RFPs for more than a century, they are notorious for being tedious, explains Will Feldman, a recent Northeastern University graduate. One of the biggest bottlenecks is the questionnaire portion, he explains.
“When a company wants to purchase from one of these vendors, they come up with a list of questions or even hundreds of pages of questions,” he says. “It’s extremely time consuming for the different companies trying to win these bids. They’ll try to answer all these questions, and it’s an extremely manual process.”
At Settle, Feldman and his three Northeastern co-founders are upgrading that process for the 21st century. They founded the technology startup in fall 2023 while taking part in the Semester In Silicon Valley program at Northeastern.
The team includes Feldman, Alex Nikanov, Dilan Bhat and Ben Wetzell — students brought together by the program with a desire to solve real-world problems with technology.
It’s best to think of Settle as a search-and-answer platform built on top of a series of AI technologies, the founders explain. It takes advantage of generative AI and vector search — a method of finding patterns in data — to help bidders significantly cut down the time it takes to find and answer RFP questions.
Feldman, the company’s head of product, lays it out like this: Let’s say a bidder has a specific question from an RFP they need help answering and types it into Settle’s search tool. The platform scans the bidder’s database to find previous RFP questions they’ve answered that are similar and uses AI to help them generate an exact response based on that data.
Nikanov, head of engineering, says that because Settle’s responses are based on previous responses and company data, the risk that the AI may hallucinate and give false answers goes down significantly.
“When these companies answer these massive lists of questions, they need precision accuracy,” he says. “They don’t want some random answer that comes out of the ether and has no relevance to them. You could just upload these questions to ChatGPT, but it’s probably going to hallucinate a bunch. That’s the problem we were trying to solve.”
For now, the company plugs into OpenAI’s API, but the founders say that down the road, they may take advantage of models from other AI companies, including Anthropic or Meta.
To date, the company has secured relationships with a handful of clients, and while Settle is a side project for the co-founders, they have ambitions to make it their full-time jobs.
Originally, the team thought to target employees going through the onboarding process in the corporate office space, but in the process of talking to potential customers, they found there was a major opportunity to disrupt the RFP procurement system, says Bhat, Settle’s CEO.
“We weren’t getting much of a response from [our onboarding product],” he says. “The vice presidents, the heads of the team, they just didn’t care about this onboarding problem because it wasn’t costing them enough money, and it wasn’t painful enough for them. We talked to one company, and they said, ‘We’re going to be honest. Onboarding is not that big of a problem for us, but our salesmen are constantly trying to put out fires with these RFPs.’”
It wasn’t hard for Settle to pivot since its onboarding product was also based on search and AI, Bhat says. They made the switch last May, and they are certainly glad they did.
Wetzell, who is graduating from Northeastern this month, is head of sales for Settle. He spends a lot of his time cold-calling potential clients. While talking to complete strangers may seem daunting, Wetzell had plenty of practice doing just that in the entrepreneurship program.
For one assignment, the students had to walk around the streets of San Francisco and strike up conversations with pedestrians.
“They said there was no better environment than San Francisco to have these conversations. Really, for me at least, it threw me out of my comfort zone,” says Feldman.
In a lot of ways, those first few weeks in the entrepreneurship program were a baptism by fire for the four co-founders.
“One of the cool things about that class and the reason I love the program so much is that entrepreneurship is an art and there is no [definitive] answer,” says Wetzell. “Everything is trial and error. That’s what I learned. … I learned the process of how hard it can be to be an entrepreneur, but how rewarding it can be.”
Even though they all have graduated — save for Wetzell — they continue to use Northeastern’s resources to help them grow their business. For example, they still regularly call Naeem Zafar, the faculty director of the Silicon Valley program and a professor in the D’Amore-Mckim School of Business, for advice.
“It’s been really cool to see this transition from something that was definitely a school class project to all of a sudden thinking, ‘Wait, this could be real,’” says Bhat. “People are actually knocking on our door trying to get us to work with them because they are excited to see that. Northeastern has facilitated that all the way.”