About RFI Hawk
Why we built it
Federal pursuit economics are asymmetric. A large prime can absorb a lost bid; a small business feels every one. The question is not whether you can do the work. It is whether you can afford to find out.
Pursuit costs of 3 to 5 percent of contract value are a commonly cited rule of thumb among proposal professionals. Many pursuits do not convert, and the cost is sunk either way. A company that bids everything it could plausibly do spends its best people on the wrong opportunities and rebuilds the same proposal process every time. RFI Hawk exists so that a small company can find the right work, decide whether to pursue it, and build a better response with the people it already has.
Who built it
RFI Hawk is built and operated by Salian Defense, a veteran-owned company that has lived the problem from the contractor side. We are a small team of federal contracting practitioners and software engineers. We built the product we wanted when we were the ones deciding whether a solicitation was worth three weeks of nights.
Our philosophy
Better decisions before more automation. The most valuable thing the product can do is help you say no to the wrong pursuit early and yes to the right one with a plan. Drafting help matters, and the proposal workspace is a large part of the product, but a correct no-bid saves weeks and a fast draft of the wrong proposal saves nothing.
That is why the fit score shows its factors, the bid or no-bid worksheet produces a written rationale rather than a percentage, and nothing in RFI Hawk claims to predict an award. AI is named where it does a specific job: drafting a section from your evidence, extracting requirements into a compliance matrix, flagging a claim your documents do not support.
A small business should win because it can perform, not because it can afford a giant proposal department.
RFI Hawk and Salian Defense
RFI Hawk identifies requirements. Salian Defense may help you meet some of them. When a solicitation calls for a facility clearance, RFI Hawk flags it and the facility clearance guide walks you through the process; Salian Defense can advise on the clearance itself. When a solicitation calls for a secure facility, RFI Hawk flags the requirement; Salian Defense may help you solve it. The two are separate services, and nothing in RFI Hawk requires you to use Salian Defense.
A facility clearance (FCL) is the Department of Defense determination that a company is eligible to access classified information; it is governed by 32 CFR Part 117 and administered by the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency (DCSA). Current as of 2026-09-02
What RFI Hawk does today
RFI Hawk pulls active contract opportunities from SAM.gov every day, and adds federal grants from Grants.gov, research announcements from DARPA, DIU and NSTXL, SBIR and STTR solicitations from SBIR.gov, and civilian agency postings from FedConnect. Award history comes from USAspending.gov and SAM.gov contract award data. Every posting we ingest is scored against your company profile on a 100-point scale, refreshed daily. The score is a fit score, never a probability of award. The rest of the product follows the pursuit: a bid or no-bid worksheet, price-to-win analysis, a proposal workspace on Pro and Team, reviews before export, and outcome tracking afterward. The seven stages are laid out on the home page.
Contact
Questions about the product, institutional licensing for APEX Accelerators and similar centers, or Enterprise agreements: info@saliandefense.com. Security reports: security@saliandefense.com, and see the Trust Center.