Bill Gurley and Jack Altman back Pursuit, a startup that helps companies sell to the government.

Mike Vichich grew up in Michigan. His family devoted their lives to public service, he recalls. His parents were teachers, his uncle was a fighter pilot, and both grandparents served in the military. “When I was young, public service was always a really great way to spend one’s life and career,” he told TechCrunch. “I have three young children, and I want them to grow up in a country where the government can actually get things done.”

After working in consulting, he started a consumer company that he sold to Olo for $200 million 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 the next chapter of their careers.

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

Pursuit works by continuously reading public data from approximately 11,000 state, local, and educational (SLED) agencies, Vichich explained. That means our AI system is crawling budgets, contract registers, FIOA records, and requests for proposals from every state, school district, county, city, and special district across the country. “We transform fragmented public data into fully researched opportunities,” he said.

We then surface which SLED agencies are most likely to purchase Pursuit’s client-specific services within the next year based on signals such as budget, challenges faced, and who is in charge.

He said the customer is any company that sells products to public service agencies, and described Pursuit as “an AI clone of itself that lets you know everything that’s happening on every account in your patch.”

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

Vichich said he hopes Pursuit will help make SLED contracting opportunities more transparent and accessible. “The data has always been public, which is ironic,” he said. It’s just that this data is buried in thousands of websites and lost in PDFs and conference videos.

“The cost of finding and analyzing them has historically been too high relative to the value of all the signal contracts,” he continued. “Pursuit is the layer that turns sunlight into something useful.”