Negent Bio checks every equipment purchase against federal rules in minutes, not weeks — so your team can get back to the bench. Built for SBIR and STTR biotechs that have the compliance burden of a university and the staff of a startup.
From negentropy — the ordering force that resists drift toward disorder. Left alone, federal procurement splinters into emails, spreadsheets, and missing signatures. We put the structure back, automatically, so you don't have to.
A purchase that used to mean a day of cross-referencing federal thresholds now takes minutes. Upload, review, approve, done.
Every decision is logged with the exact regulation behind it. When an auditor asks, you hand them a clean record — not a scramble.
Plain-language verdicts tell you what to do and why. The founder makes the call in seconds, not after an afternoon reading the CFR.
At a university, a procurement office absorbs this work. At an SBIR-funded biotech, it lands on the founder — the same person running the science and raising the next round. Every hour spent chasing quotes and checking thresholds is an hour not spent on the work the grant was meant to fund.
Upload your procurement package — quotes, budget, justification. Negent Bio reads it, checks it against every federal rule that applies, and hands the approver a plain-language verdict with the exact regulation behind each flag. The approver clicks once. Every decision is logged to a tamper-proof audit trail you can hand an auditor without breaking a sweat. No compliance degree required.
A PI or lab manager uploads their procurement package — requisition, vendor quotes, grant budget, justification memo. Two self-attestations cover export control and original-budget status.
Negent Bio pulls the relevant fields from every document — vendor, amount, grant number, PI, dates, document types, justification text — and flags anything missing before the workflow proceeds.
Every submission is run against the full set of federal procurement rules — 2 CFR 200, NIH GPS, ITAR/EAR — plus a cross-submission check for purchase splitting. Every flag arrives with its regulatory citation attached.
The procurement officer or grants administrator sees a verdict card, expandable flags with citations, the original documents alongside, and a required-actions checklist. They approve, request revision, or reject with a mandatory note.
Every decision is written to an immutable audit log. Approved purchases push to JAGGAER, Coupa, or your existing procurement platform. The full audit log is exportable on demand — the artifact a federal auditor wants to see.
Federal compliance is deterministic logic, not probabilistic judgment. Every rule is encoded as explicit code with a citation. Machine learning never makes a compliance decision. It assists with justification scoring and pattern detection in adjacent layers — never in the path that produces a verdict.
Negent Bio surfaces a recommendation with structured reasoning. A human approver makes the final decision and records a note. There is no autonomous approval path. The system makes audits faster; it does not replace institutional judgment.
Every state transition, every approver action, every threshold change is written to an immutable log. The constraint is enforced by database triggers, not application code — a tampering attempt fails with a hard error before it reaches disk. Exportable as CSV for federal auditors on demand.
Negent Bio is not a procurement platform. It does not replace JAGGAER, Coupa, ZAGENO, or your ERP. It sits in front of them as a compliance gate, then hands the approved purchase back to the system you already run.
Every flag, every block, every recommendation includes its regulatory citation — 2 CFR 200.320(a), NIH GPS 8.1.2.5, 22 CFR 120–130. Auditors do not want explanations. They want the rule and the evidence. Negent Bio is built around that.
Rate-limited APIs, security headers, structured event logging, database-level constraints, fresh-environment verification, and a comprehensive test suite. Built to deploy, not just to demo.
The core compliance workflow is built and verified. Audit-trail enforcement is live at the database level. Pilot institutions are being onboarded this quarter. Request access →
The full compliance lattice, with thresholds reflecting the October 2024 and October 2025 OMB revisions. Every rule fires deterministically against the extracted submission data. Severity determines whether the workflow proceeds, warns, or blocks. New rules are added as the regulatory landscape evolves.
| Rule | Threshold | Citation | Severity |
|---|---|---|---|
| Micro-Purchase | < $15,000 | 2 CFR 200.320(a)(1) | Info |
| Capital Equipment | ≥ $10,000 | 2 CFR 200.313 | Warn |
| Quote Requirement | $15K – $500K, < 3 quotes | 2 CFR 200.320(a)(2) | Block |
| NIH Prior Approval | ≥ $25,000, not in budget | NIH GPS 8.1.2.5 | Block |
| Formal RFP | ≥ $500,000 | 2 CFR 200.320(a)(2) | Block |
| Export Control | ITAR / EAR attested | 22 CFR 120–130 · 15 CFR 730–774 | Review |
| Budget Period | Delivery after grant end | 2 CFR 200.309 | Warn |
| Build America, Buy America | Foreign-sourced equipment | 2 CFR 200.322 | Warn |
| Cost Sharing / Matching | Required match not identified | 2 CFR 200.306 | Warn |
| Conflict of Interest | Vendor relationship attested | 2 CFR 200.318(c) | Review |
| Purchase Splitting | 30-day window, same PI / grant / vendor | 2 CFR 200.320 | Warn |
Our home base. Federal grant recipients with the full weight of 2 CFR 200 and none of the procurement staff. The founder signs every purchase — we make that take minutes.
Series A and beyond, past the founder-does-everything stage but not yet ready to staff a full procurement office. Compliance without the headcount.
Independent research bodies and contract research organizations receiving federal awards — often the most exposed and least staffed for compliance.
Procurement and grants offices managing thousands of federally-funded equipment purchases a year. Audit defensibility at scale.
We're onboarding a small group of SBIR and STTR biotechs this quarter. Free through 2026, set up in days, with a direct line to the people building it. If you're a federally-funded founder tired of being your own procurement department, this is for you.