Pursuit, a startup that helps companies find and win state and local government contracts, announced a $22 million seed round on April 29, 2026. The round was led by Mike Rosengarten, co-founder of OpenGov, bringing the company’s total funding to $25.5 million. Notable individual investors include Bill Gurley, Jack Altman of Alt Capital, and Sam Hinkie of 87 Capital.
Founded in 2023 by Mike Vichich and Brandon Max, Pursuit uses AI to continuously scan public data from approximately 11,000 state, local, and education (SLED) entities. Its systems crawl budgets, contract registers, FOIA records, and requests for proposals from states, school districts, counties, cities, and special districts across the country. The platform then surfaces the agencies most likely to purchase a customer’s services within the next year, based on signals such as budget data, operational challenges, and leadership.
Vichich previously founded a consumer company that he sold to Olo for $200 million in 2021. He and Max began developing Pursuit after repeatedly identifying the difficulty of selling to government as a persistent problem worth solving. Vichich described the product as an “AI clone” of its customers, designed to keep them informed about every account in their territory.
The core challenge Pursuit addresses is accessibility, not availability. Government procurement data is technically public, but is scattered across thousands of websites, buried in PDFs, and embedded in meeting videos. “The cost of finding and parsing it has historically been too high relative to the value of any single contract,” Vichich said. Competitors in the space include Starbridge, GovSpend, and Deltek GovWin IQ.
Vichich, whose family background is rooted in public service, said the broader goal is to make SLED contract opportunities more transparent and accessible to the companies that pursue them.
Source: TechCrunch