Pursuit raises $22 million to simplify government sales

Pursuit, a startup that helps companies find and win government contracts, announced on Wednesday that it has raised a $22 million Series A funding round. The investment was led by Mike Rosengarten, a general partner at Builders VC. Other investors participating in the company’s funding to date include Jack Altman, Bill Gurley, and Sam Hinkie. This latest round brings the startup’s total funding to $25.5 million. Mike Vichich, the founder and CEO of Pursuit, previously founded a consumer company that he sold to Olo for $200 million in 2021. Following that acquisition, Vichich and founding engineer Brandon Max launched Pursuit in 2023 to address the persistent difficulties businesses face when trying to sell to public agencies. Vichich, who has a family background in public service, noted that his motivation for the venture stems from a desire to help governments operate more effectively.

The platform operates by continuously crawling and parsing public data across the nation. According to Vichich, Pursuit’s systems read information from around 110,000 state, local, and education (SLED) entities. This process involves scanning budgets, contract registers, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) records, and requests for proposals from cities, counties, school districts, and special districts across the nation. The startup’s AI models analyze these fragmented sources to turn raw public data into fully researched opportunities, identifying which public agencies are most likely to purchase a client’s specific services within the coming year. Vichich described the tool as an AI clone of the sales team, designed to ensure clients stay informed about every account in their territory.

By targeting this sector, Pursuit enters a market with established competitors such as Starbridge, GovSpend, and Deltek GovWin IQ. However, the startup aims to differentiate itself by lowering the operational barriers to accessing public records. Vichich noted that while the underlying data has always been public, it has historically been buried across thousands of websites, PDFs, and meeting videos, making the cost of finding and parsing it too high relative to the value of the contract signal. According to Mike Vichich, the CEO and founder of Pursuit, the platform serves a clear purpose: “Pursuit is the layer that turns sunlight into something useful.”

Why it matters

Pursuit aims to solve the difficulty of selling to government agencies by using AI to parse fragmented public data from around 110,000 state, local, and education entities.