FAST 50: Amivero relies on transparency to fulfill its mission, vision

Olivia Trivisani Bowker started Amivero in 2018 with the idea of letting the federal agency customers and employees alike see everything that goes into the lifecycle of government contracting.

Which means transparency is the foundation of how Bowker leads Amivero through its opportunity identification processes, proposal development function, captures of contracts and then executing on the program.

Recompetes begin on day one of the contract, after all.

“Successfully delivering on what you've promised is the first step,” Bowker told us. “Your word is everything and your word is defined by fulfilling what you promise.”

Bowker said she came up with the idea of Amivero from her belief that there could be much more integration between the growth, sales and business development teams. She did not feel that was the case at many prior stops in her career.

“You need to play the game so that you can change the game, so I play the game to change it,” Bowker said. When you get there, you prove and show that you can build trusted relationships to win business and successfully deliver.”

Amivero comes in at position No. 4 on the 2024 Washington Technology Fast 50 rankings of the government market’s fastest-growing small businesses. The 117-employee company recorded approximately $26.2 million in revenue for 2023, which translates to a five-year compound annual growth rate of 150.3%.

Amivero’s three primary customers are the Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agencies, plus the General Services Administration’s Technology Transformation Services organization.

Bowker listed digital transformation, identity management and what she called “everything data” as the company’s three core lines of work for agencies.

The digital transformation focus is largely centered on the software practice known as DevSecOps – Development, Operations and Security.

Amivero’s approach to DevSecOps is “basically about building applications more quickly and with the understanding of dependencies in building new applications, which is the infrastructure and security,” Bowker said.

Like at any government contractor, Amivero also has a network of partners in the commercial technology sector it can reach into as part of the larger solution development and deployment effort.

The company’s website lists Amazon Web Services, Confluent, Databricks, Microsoft, ServiceNow, Snowflake, Tableau, UiPath and Zendesk as partners.

On the identity management front, Bowker provided the example of Amivero’s operations team that watches the so-called Dark Web to see what identities are being sold and state or local policies being taken advantage of.

Dark Web users can use that information to illegally obtain benefits or break tax laws, Bowker explained.

Amivero’s work with government data involves much of today’s much-talked-about techniques in artificial intelligence, machine learning and analytics.

Then there is the company’s tagline of “Human-Centered, Data-Driven” that drives all of those areas.

Taking consideration of who the users of that data and tech tools are is part and parcel of the government’s overarching customer experience agenda, which is also embedded in Amivero’s approach.

But as Bowker pointed out, there are limits to what contractors like Amivero and their agency clients can do on the user interface front.

“You can't give everybody what they want because everybody wants different things,” Bowker said. “Because it's data-driven and because you're human-centered, you communicate back to the stakeholders that aren't going to get what they want.”

Bowker’s outlook for the next three to five years of Amivero’s journey will include an eventual graduation from its small business status. However, the workforce is always on the front of her mind given how and why she started the company.

“The North Star is to continue to help all generations, all people of varying backgrounds, find a way to not only upskill themselves in order to keep up with technology, but to ensure that technology is used in a way to further our customers missions,” Bowker said.