Invoice Gurley, Jack Altman again startup Pursuit, which helps corporations promote to authorities

Mike Vichich grew up in Michigan. His household, he recollects, devoted their lives to public service. His mother and father had been academics, his uncle a fighter pilot, whereas each units of grandparents served within the military. “Rising up, public service was all the time a extremely admirable technique to spend one’s life and one’s profession,” he instructed TechCrunch. “I’ve three younger children. I need them to develop up in a rustic the place authorities can really get stuff executed.”

He went on to work in consulting, then launched a shopper firm that he bought to Olo for $200 million again in 2021. After his spouse gave start to their third son, he and Brandon Max, a founding engineer at his final startup, started discussing what they needed to do on this subsequent chapter of their careers.

Every concept they’d got here again to 1 factor: that promoting to the federal government was actually arduous. “We had been like, perhaps there’s one thing to that.” In 2023, they launched Pursuit, a website that helps corporations discover and win authorities contracts. On Wednesday, it introduced a $22 million seed spherical led by Mike Rosengarten, the co-founder of OpenGov. The corporate has raised $25.5 million in funding to this point from buyers corresponding to Jack Altman (then at Alt Capital), Invoice Gurley, and Sam Hinkie at 87 Capital.

Pursuit works by repeatedly studying public information from round 11,000 state, native, training (SLED) entities, Vichich defined, which means its AI programs are crawling budgets, contract registers, FIOA information, request for proposals from each state, college district, county, metropolis, and particular district throughout the nation. “We flip fragmented public information into totally researched alternatives,” he mentioned.

Then it surfaces the SLED businesses most probably to purchase a Pursuit’s prospects specific providers inside the subsequent 12 months, based mostly on indicators corresponding to their funds, the problems they face, and who’s in cost.

He mentioned the client is any firm that sells to public service businesses, and described Pursuit as an “AI clone of themselves, ensuring they know every little thing that’s taking place throughout each account of their patch.”

Others on this area embody Starbridge, GovSpend, and Deltek GovWin IQ.

Vichich mentioned he hopes Pursuit might help make SLED contract alternatives extra clear and accessible. “The information has all the time been public, that’s the irony,” he mentioned. It’s simply that this information is buried throughout 1000’s upon 1000’s of internet sites, misplaced in PDFs and assembly movies.

“The price of discovering and parsing it has traditionally been too excessive relative to the worth of any sign contract,” he continued. “Pursuit is the layer that turns daylight into one thing helpful.”