Mike Vichich grew up in Michigan. His family, he recalls, dedicated their lives to public service. His parents were teachers, his uncle a fighter pilot, while both sets of grandparents served in the army. “Growing up, public service was always a really admirable way to spend one’s life and one’s career,” he told TechCrunch. “I have three young kids. I want them to grow up in a country where government can actually get stuff done.”

He went on to work in consulting, then launched a consumer company that he sold to Olo for $200 million back in 2021. After his wife gave birth to their third son, he and Brandon Max, a founding engineer at his last startup, began discussing what they wanted to do in this next chapter of their careers.

Each idea they had came back to one thing: that selling to the government was really hard. “We were like, maybe there’s something to that.” In 2023, they launched Pursuit, a site that helps companies find and win government contracts. On Wednesday, it announced a $22 million seed round led by Mike Rosengarten, the co-founder of OpenGov. The company has raised $25.5 million in funding to date from investors such as Jack Altman (then at Alt Capital), Bill Gurley, and Sam Hinkie at 87 Capital.

Image Credits:Pursuit

Pursuit works by continuously reading public data from around 11,000 state, local, education (SLED) entities, Vichich explained, meaning its AI systems are crawling budgets, contract registers, FIOA records, request for proposals from every state, school district, county, city, and special district across the nation. “We turn fragmented public data into fully researched opportunities,” he said.

Then it surfaces the SLED agencies most likely to buy a Pursuit’s customers particular services within the next year, based on signals such as their budget, the issues they face, and who is in charge.

He said the customer is any company that sells to public service agencies, and described Pursuit as an “AI clone of themselves, making sure they know everything that’s happening across every account in their patch.”

Others in this space include Starbridge, GovSpend, and Deltek GovWin IQ.

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Vichich said he hopes Pursuit can help make SLED contract opportunities more transparent and accessible. “The data has always been public, that’s the irony,” he said. It’s just that this data is buried across thousands upon thousands of websites, lost in PDFs and meeting videos.

“The cost of finding and parsing it has historically been too high relative to the value of any signal contract,” he continued. “Pursuit is the layer that turns sunlight into something useful.”

Topics

government, SLED, Startups, Venture

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Dominic-Madori Davis

Senior Reporter, Venture

Dominic-Madori Davis is a senior venture capital and startup reporter at TechCrunch. She is based in New York City.

You can contact or verify outreach from Dominic by emailing dominic.davis@techcrunch.com or via encrypted message at +1 646 831-7565 on Signal.

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Bill Gurley, Jack Altman back startup Pursuit, which helps companies sell to government