Benchmark VCs Back Pursuit to Help Companies Sell to Government

Growing up in Michigan, Mike Vichich was surrounded by public servants. His parents were teachers, his uncle flew fighter jets, and both sets of grandparents served in the army. That upbringing left a lasting impression. “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.”

After a career in consulting, Vichich founded a consumer company that sold to Olo for $200 million in 2021. When his wife gave birth to their third son, he and Brandon Max, a founding engineer from his previous startup, began mapping out their next move. Every idea they considered circled back to a stubborn problem: selling to the government is painfully difficult. “We were like, maybe there’s something to that,” Vichich recalled.

In 2023, they launched Pursuit, a platform that helps companies identify and win government contracts. On Wednesday, the company announced a $22 million seed round led by Mike Rosengarten, co-founder of OpenGov. To date, Pursuit has raised $25.5 million from investors including Jack Altman (then at Alt Capital), Bill Gurley, and Sam Hinkie at 87 Capital.

Pursuit works by continuously ingesting public data from roughly 11,000 state, local, and education (SLED) entities. Vichich explained that the company’s AI systems crawl budgets, contract registers, FOIA records, and requests for proposals from every state, school district, county, city, and special district across the country. “We turn fragmented public data into fully researched opportunities,” he said.

The platform then surfaces the SLED agencies most likely to buy a customer’s specific services within the next year. It does this by analyzing signals such as the agency’s budget, the problems it faces, and who is in charge. Vichich described Pursuit as an “AI clone of themselves, making sure they know everything that’s happening across every account in their patch.”

The company competes with others in the government sales intelligence space, including Starbridge, GovSpend, and Deltek GovWin IQ.

Vichich hopes Pursuit can make SLED contract opportunities more transparent and accessible. “The data has always been public, that’s the irony,” he said. The problem is that this information is scattered across thousands of websites, buried in PDFs and meeting videos. “The cost of finding and parsing it has historically been too high relative to the value of any single contract,” he added. “Pursuit is the layer that turns sunlight into something useful.”