A Startup Gets $22 Million to Make It Easier to Sell Software to the Government

A company called Pursuit has raised $22 million in funding to build software that helps other technology companies sell to government agencies. The money comes from experienced investors including Bill Gurley, a well-known venture capitalist, and Jack Altman, who co-founded a software company called Lattice, according to Yahoo Finance. The lead investor is Mike Rosengarten, a co-founder of OpenGov, a company that has already built a successful business selling to government.

Pursuit's software tackles a major headache for technology vendors: the process of selling to federal, state, and local government agencies is complicated and time-consuming. The startup's platform automates much of the paperwork involved — writing proposals that meet government rules, handling vendor registration, and tracking opportunities across different government websites.

Why Government Sales Are So Hard

Government agencies collectively spend hundreds of billions of dollars on technology each year. But buying from them is not like buying from a regular business. The sales process takes a long time, the rules are unclear, and there is heavy paperwork and compliance work to manage. Many software companies either skip government business altogether or hire specialized teams just to handle those sales.

Pursuit's software is designed to make government contracting easier and less specialized. Instead of needing a team that knows all the rules, companies can use Pursuit's system to do much of that work automatically. The software generates proposals that follow the rules, keeps track of required certifications, and manages the paperwork.

How Pursuit's Software Works

Pursuit's platform plugs into the software tools that companies already use to manage their sales and proposals. It pulls opportunity information from government websites like SAM.gov, then uses artificial intelligence to match what a company can offer with what the government is looking for. This reduces the amount of work a sales team has to do to get started.

The most complex part of what Pursuit does is handling compliance — the specific rules and documents each government contract requires. Different agencies and different types of contracts have different requirements. Pursuit's system keeps track of all those rules and automatically creates the right documents.

Other companies already serve parts of this market, such as GovWin and Deltek. But Pursuit says it is taking a different approach by tying everything together in one system, rather than making separate tools for finding opportunities or writing proposals.

A Pattern Tech Has Seen Before

Over the past ten years, government agencies have started to modernize how they buy technology. They use digital marketplaces, streamlined applications for proposals, and cloud-first policies that make it easier on their end. But the vendors selling to the government have had to do much of the work manually. Nothing has really changed for them until now.

This feels like a pattern we have seen before in technology. In the early days of marketing automation software, companies started using web forms and online content to collect leads from customers, which made the buying side much easier. But salespeople were still doing most of the work by hand to run their own marketing campaigns. Companies that built tools to automate the vendor's side of that process — like Marketo and Eloqua — ended up capturing a lot of value as the market grew.

Government sales automation appears to be heading down a similar path. As more government agencies adopt modern ways of buying and use cloud services, the number of opportunities available to vendors is growing. Companies that can use software to pursue government contracts systematically — instead of relying on specialist knowledge or personal relationships — stand to gain a real advantage.

What This Means Going Forward

The $22 million funding round reflects both the size of the opportunity and the technical challenge involved. Building this kind of software requires deep expertise in government rules and procedures, plus the ability to connect with multiple systems. The amount of funding suggests Pursuit plans to hire significantly to build the product and bring in customers.

The investors involved — Gurley and Altman — have broad networks in the enterprise software world, which hints that Pursuit may focus on selling to established software companies rather than building its own sales team to pursue individual government contracts.

The real test will come down to two things. First: can Pursuit's system generate proposals and compliance documents that are accurate enough to not disqualify companies from government contracts — in government sales, mistakes can eliminate a vendor entirely. Second: does the software actually find all the worthwhile opportunities available. Without both of those working well, companies will not trust the platform.

The timing looks favorable. Federal and state governments are continuing to modernize how they buy and deploy technology, and they are using cloud services more. This means more opportunities are becoming available through automated tools, and that is exactly where Pursuit's software can help. For any software company that has wanted to sell to the government but found it too complicated, Pursuit may offer a way in.