Small Business Highlight: Spring & Forge
Meet Spring & Forge—the go-to-market and non-dilutive funding accelerator for hard-tech, defense, aerospace, and dual-use companies.
Editor's note: This is a new, recurring section of The MC Post we are adding as a way to highlight many of the amazing small businesses across the defense industrial base that are part of Mission Cultivate. Hear from them in their own words.
Spring & Forge is a go-to-market and non-dilutive funding accelerator for hard-tech, defense, aerospace, and dual-use companies. We work with founders, operators, and investors to bridge the gap between breakthrough technology and real-world adoption, whether that’s commercial traction, government customers, or capital that actually understands regulated markets. Our work sits at the intersection of GTM strategy, government procurement, and funding strategy. We help companies move faster without cutting corners in markets where credibility, compliance, and execution matter.
A core part of how we do this is WayRaise, our proprietary funding intelligence and prioritization platform. WayRaise powers how we identify winnable funding pathways, align GTM and capital strategy, and help teams focus their limited time on opportunities that actually move the business forward.
Who is Spring & Forge for, and what problems are you solving?
Spring & Forge primarily serves technology companies operating in complex, regulated, or capital-intensive markets, especially aerospace, defense, energy, advanced manufacturing, and dual-use tech both supported by WayRaise as part of the Spring & Forge offering. We tend to see two core user personas:
- Business / Founder / Operator Persona
This is the larger audience: CEOs, COOs, heads of growth, or technical founders who have real technology, often with pilots or early customers, or who are navigating long sales cycles or struggling to translate vision into a repeatable GTM or funding strategy. They’re told to “just sell more” or “raise capital,” but the playbooks they’re handed are built for SaaS, not for defense, aerospace, or infrastructure markets where trust, timing, and structure matter.
- Grant / Funding / Program Manager Persona
This is often inside mid-sized companies, universities, or public-sector or quasi-public organizations. They’re overwhelmed by fragmented funding sources, unclear eligibility rules, and internal pressure to “go find money” without tools that prioritize what’s actually winnable.
As someone with deep experience in defense and dual-use tech, what trends stand out?
For businesses specifically, the market is noisy and unforgiving. There’s more capital theoretically available, but investors are slower, more conservative, and more specialized. There are three things I’m watching closely. First, operational energy and logistics innovation.
Defense is finally prioritizing sustainability—not as ESG theater, but as a tactical advantage.
Then there’s the prime–sub relationships becoming more flexible. Smaller, faster companies are getting pulled into large programs earlier, if they know how to position themselves. And capital at this point is demanding execution, not vision decks. I truly believe the era of raising on promise alone is over. Traction, commercial or government, matters more than ever. Here’s my advice: Don’t optimize for hype. Optimize for credibility and momentum. The rest follows.
What shaped your approach to the problem?
Early on, we repeatedly saw companies with strong technology fail, not because the tech wasn’t good, but because they were chasing the wrong opportunities at the wrong time.
That’s what ultimately led us to build WayRaise. We needed a way to systematize what “winnable” actually means. In doing so, we help companies capture institutional knowledge across grants, contracts, and programs and focus on execution instead of constant recalibration. WayRaise is essentially the operational backbone of the Spring & Forge methodology.
Where do companies struggle most in bridging vision to execution?
The most consistent theme we see is misalignment between narrative and reality. Founders often have a powerful long-term vision, but their GTM motion doesn’t match their buyer, their funding strategy doesn’t match their maturity, or their messaging is either too technical or too generic. A common failure mode is chasing everything.
The companies that succeed learn to sequence: one buyer type, one funding strategy, one execution loop at a time. A success story I love to see is when a company stops pitching “the future of X” and starts closing very specific, very real contracts that prove momentum. Once that happens, capital follows more naturally and on better terms.
Tell us about your platform, WayRaise.
WayRaise was built out of frustration and necessity, actually. After years of helping companies chase grants, contracts, and non-dilutive funding, we kept seeing the same issues. People being overwhelmed, sifting through numerous sources to discover funding. Teams wasting months on unwinnable opportunities. No consistent way to assess probability of win. Institutional knowledge living in people’s heads, not systems.
WayRaise is our answer to that. It’s a platform that helps organizations discover relevant funding opportunities, score them using a Raise Score based on eligibility, fit, and historical signals, and learn from historical winning data rather than guesswork. WayRaise doesn’t “decide” for people—and this is really important to me. It reduces cognitive load so humans can make better decisions. The AI surfaces patterns humans can’t easily see and flags risk and misalignment early … but the final judgment stays human. In an age of automation, WayRaise gives people back time and clarity rather than taking agency away.
How do people get started with WayRaise?
The first step is simple: go create an account. You can define your organization type, technology focus, and goals and then run your first funding report to see what’s actually worth pursuing. From there, teams can go deeper, or bring Spring & Forge in for strategic grant support if needed.
Get connected with Mollie at Spring & Forge:
WayRaise: https://www.wayraise.com/spring-forge
Spring & Forge: https://www.springandforge.io/
Mission Cultivate: https://app.missioncultivate.com/users/mollie.jahner/
It's 100% Free to Subscribe to The MC Post
The MC Post is a weekly curated Defense publication. We publish a new edition every Saturday morning. If you're the type who wants to know about things the minute they happen, The MC Post may not be for you. But if you, like most of us, don't have time to refresh dozens of sources every day, we invite you to slow down, grab your coffee, and catch up on what matters each Saturday–just like old times.