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Mike Vichich grew up in Michigan. His family, he recalls, dedicated their lives to public service. His parents were teachers, his uncle a fighter pilot, while both sets of grandparents served in the army. \u201cGrowing up, public service was always a really admirable way to spend one\u2019s life and one\u2019s career,\u201d he told TechCrunch. \u201cI have three young kids. I want them to grow up in a country where government can actually get stuff done.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
He went on to work in consulting, then launched a consumer company that he sold to Olo for $200 million back 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 this next chapter of their careers.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Each idea they had came back to one thing: that selling to the government was really hard. \u201cWe were like, maybe there\u2019s something to that.\u201d In 2023, they launched Pursuit, a site that helps companies find and win government contracts. On Wednesday, it announced a $22 million seed round led by Mike Rosengarten, the co-founder of OpenGov. The company has raised $25.5 million in funding to date from investors such as Jack Altman (then at Alt Capital), Bill Gurley, and Sam Hinkie at 87 Capital.\u00a0<\/p>\n Pursuit works by continuously reading public data from around 11,000 state, local, education (SLED) entities, Vichich explained, meaning its AI systems are crawling budgets, contract registers, FIOA records, request for proposals from every state, school district, county, city, and special district across the nation. \u201cWe turn fragmented public data into fully researched opportunities,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n Then it surfaces the SLED agencies most likely to buy a Pursuit\u2019s customers particular services within the next year, based on signals such as their budget, the issues they face, and who is in charge.\u00a0<\/p>\n He said the customer is any company that sells to public service agencies, and described Pursuit as an \u201cAI clone of themselves, making sure they know everything that\u2019s happening across every account in their patch.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Others in this space include Starbridge, GovSpend, and Deltek GovWin IQ.\u00a0<\/p>\n Techcrunch event<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSan Francisco, CA<\/span> Vichich said he hopes Pursuit can help make SLED contract opportunities more transparent and accessible. \u201cThe data has always been public, that\u2019s the irony,\u201d he said. It\u2019s just that this data is buried across thousands upon thousands of websites, lost in PDFs and meeting videos. <\/p>\n \u201cThe cost of finding and parsing it has historically been too high relative to the value of any signal contract,\u201d he continued. \u201cPursuit is the layer that turns sunlight into something useful.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission<\/a>. This doesn\u2019t affect our editorial independence.<\/em><\/p>\n
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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tOctober 13-15, 2026<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n