Bill Gurley and Jack Altman back Pursuit, a startup that helps companies sell to governments

Mike Vicic grew up in Michigan. His family dedicated their lives to public service, he recalls. His parents were teachers, his uncle was in the FBI, and both of his grandparents served in the Army. “Growing up, public service was always a really great way to spend your life and career,” he told TechCrunch. “I have three young children, and I want them to grow up in a country where the government actually gets things done.”

He continued to work in consulting and then started a consumer-facing company, which he sold to Oro in 2021 for $200 million. After his wife gave birth to their third son, he and Brandon Max, the founding engineer at his last startup, began talking about what they wanted to do with the next chapter of their careers.

Each idea they considered came down to one thing: it was very difficult to sell to the government. “We thought maybe there was something to it.” In 2023, he launched Pursuit, a site that helps companies find and win government contracts. On Wednesday, the company announced a $22 million Series A round led by Mike Rosengarten, general partner at Builders VC and co-founder of OpenGov. The company has raised $25.5 million in funding so far from investors including Jack Altman (then of Alt Capital), Bill Gurley, and Sam Hinkie of 87 Capital.

Vicic explained that Tracking works by continuously reading public data from approximately 110,000 state, local, and education (SLED) organizations, meaning the company’s AI system traverses budgets, contract registers, FOIA records, and requests for proposals from every state, school district, county, city, and special district nationwide. “We turn fragmented public data into fully researched opportunities,” he said.

We then reveal which SLED distributors are most likely to purchase a Pursuit customer’s specific services within the next year, based on signals such as their budget, the problems they face, and who is responsible.

He said his customers are any company that sells to public service organizations and described Pursuit as “an AI clone of our company that makes sure we know what’s going on with every account in the patch.”

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

Vicic said he hopes Pursuit will help make SLED contracting opportunities more transparent and accessible. “The data has always been public, which is ironic,” he says. But this data is buried among thousands of websites, mixed in with PDFs and conference videos.

“Historically, the cost of finding and analyzing contract signals has been too high compared to the value of them,” he continued. “Pursuit is the layer that turns sunlight into something useful.”

This article has been updated to clarify the job Vicic’s uncle held and this round.