April 2026 Startup Grant Awarded to MITekz Solutions LLC

We’re excited to announce the April $10,000 Startup Grant recipient. Congratulations to Kim Hernandez, founder of MITekz Solutions LLC.

Recently, WomensNet Advisory Board member Jama Hernandez sat down with Kim for an exclusive interview. You can listen to their conversation and view the transcript below.

Video Transcript

Jama: Hi everyone. My name is Jama with WomensNet, and we are excited to introduce to you our 2026 April grant recipients. We have with us Kim, co-founder of MITekz, and she is our Startup grant winner. Thank you so much for being here today. We really appreciate it. And we’re looking forward to learning more about your business and to know what makes your business unique in your field. Please tell us about your business and what or who inspired your business.

Kim: My name is Kim Hernandez and I’m the founder of MITekz but also developed a platform called TekRamp. It is all scale native compliance acceleration workspace that helps companies break into the federal markets by making compliance faster, making it more collaborative, and a repeatable process. As a veteran founded woman led business building out of Northern Virginia, I’ve seen firsthand that in high stake environments, technology has to deliver real outcomes, but in the government outdated compliance processes still keeps great vendors out of the game from essentially from being able to contribute. So the seed of the inspiration for TeKRamp ties back to my background in the military which taught me that in critical moments, software is not about the features, it’s about the reliability and the outcomes that that software can provide for folks when we’re out in the field. So it surprised me to see how stuck and outdated the tooling that we had not only in the field, but also at home state. Not because better technology didn’t exist, but because the compliance to even get in was too expensive and slow. Our software focuses around FedRAMP and CMMC compliance. Programs like that take anywhere from 12 to 18 months and the cost is in the millions. So it shuts out a lot of innovative SaaS companies and contractors. So that’s the problem that I built TeKRamp to solve- opening those federal compliance doors so that more strong vendors can serve agencies securely.

Jama: You’re filling a critical need and even understanding all the compliance regulations is a science in itself! So. Wonderful. You talked a little bit about it already, but can you tell us what else makes your approach and the service you’re providing different from others?

Kim: Most compliance today is consultants and PDFs for the most part. So you essentially hire smart people and they hand you a 400 page system security plan, also known as an SSP in a word like format. And 12 to 18 months later you find out whether the agency liked it or not, like whether they approved it or didn’t approve it. TekRamp the software that we developed is not a spreadsheet and documents like the typical way that it it’s mostly being done today. Three things set us aside that make us different. 

The first is that we have an AI driven companion embedded into the software. So it’s essentially like a virtual compliance team that helps you translate the compliance jargon that may not be familiar to the user. So it helps you understand that and it creates practical actions for you to take to get you up to compliance. It helps or walks non-expert through the implementation that matches their stack and reduces the need for the $100,000 consultant engagements that most small businesses and even like the 20 person companies that are racing toward the November CMMC deadline. It’s just not feasible, it’s very expensive. And our software helps folks go through FedRAMP- that certification is in the millions and that creates a paywall for, for Agile like SaaS vendors.

The second thing is that we’re all scale native which is essentially a machine readable format- that’s going to be the standard moving forward. That means that you can essentially author a control one time and it will flow into other compliance requirements like your FedRAMP, your CMMC, SOC 2, HIPPA and ISO artifacts. So in other words, compliance becomes code, so it’s not Word documents anymore. It can easily go into either one of those depending on what the organization requirements are. 

The third is that TekRamp is a multi-party collaboration workspace. It’s not just for the folks going through the certification, but it’s also for vendors, for assessors, for the consultants themselves, and for federal sponsors that are collaborating on the same package instead of sending emails and attachments that is usually a back and forth. It cuts back on the time. This 2026 there is a big wave of requirements coming down from the FedRAMP consolidated rules that is going to happen next month in June- everyone has to move toward a machine readable package. The second is that FedRAMP like the FedRAMP 20x Phase 3 is going to expand in the third quarter. That makes automation first authorization also like the default- so that’s another requirement. And then the third is that CMMC enforcement starts in November which is going to bring about 220,000+ defense contractors (or somewhere in that area), into compliance for the first time. So it is a requirement for you to even be able to do business with the government. If you want to take on a contract that has anything to do with the government you must be CMMC certified. So that’s what sets us apart. Right now we have the right product and the right moment where we’ve actually deployed to a production. So it’s ready to go now. That is essentially where we’re at and what sets us apart from what’s currently out there right now.

Jama: Sounds like you’re at the pulse in understanding what’s coming up, and that’s huge so that you can be an asset to all these other businesses! Thank you so much for taking the time today. We really appreciate it. And congratulations.