By Riley Kaminer
Mountain biking on Virginia Key was how childhood friends Nick López and Alfredo Ramirez reconnected with each other – taking a moment out of their busy lives to sync up on everything that had been happening in their lives.
In 2021, the conversation during this bike summit had a slightly different contour. Instead of focusing on the personal, López found himself asking Ramirez all about his work.
“He had just started a digital consultancy, and I wanted to know everything,” López told Refresh Miami of Ramirez’s new business.
One thing Ramirez kept bringing up: something called RFPs (requests for proposals). “I’d heard of this briefly when I was working at Lockheed Martin, but I wasn’t on the procurement side,” said López. “So I was kind of dumbfounded. And I was like, RF, what? Come again?”
López would soon learn the inherent power – and inherent inefficiency behind RFPs.
“RFPs are basically a way for businesses to outsource to other businesses,” explained López. And it’s a big business – companies spend $192 billion on services from professional firms just to help increase their chances of winning a bid.
“At first, I was very skeptical,” he said, pointing out how RFP processes are so opaque and impossible to find unless you know where to look. He quickly realized how RFPs can present a barrier preventing businesses from hitting goals around diversity, for example.
“How is there no marketplace for this?” said López. And so in 2021 he and Ramirez teamed up to build one: Prosal. In 2022, they would quit their jobs to work on this full time – López as CEO ad Ramirez as COO/CMO – adding co-founder/CTO Nyle Malik, a friend of López’s from college.
Through Prosal, businesses can find relevant RFPs. These RFPs come from a few different sources: they can be directly posted on Prosal’s website, Prosal’s RFP concierge may have helped a client upload it to Prosal’s website, or the Prosal team may have found and vetted a promising RFP online. Prosal has a freemium model, where users can pay to uncover premium RFPs.
To further their mission, Prosal has raised a $1.18 million seed round led by Fusen Fund alongside Brickyard Fund, Alumni Ventures, Mana Ventures, and Raiz Capital – plus a handful of angel investors.
López shared that these funds will enable the company to scale its currently 12-person team, particularly with a focus on engineering and product talent. The company has an ambitious product roadmap that includes an AI-powered feature that will suggest potential proposals to clients based on their characteristics.
They also want to leverage AI to find RFPs with so-called incumbents – where there is already a vendor in mind. That way, businesses can either forget about that RFP or go on the offense to try to beat the competition.
Prosal’s latest hire is a community manager for Prosal’s thriving user base, which includes a very active Slack. “It’s really exciting to see like-minded leaders and professionals who more often than not work remotely are building their own watercooler communities and having the business development chats that they don’t get to have normally,” Ramirez said.
Photo at top of post: Prosal co-founders, left to right: COO/CMO Alfredo Ramirez, CEO Nick López, CTO Nyle Malik.
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