How Pursuit Plans to Unlock Government Sales for Tech Companies

Pursuit, a startup building software to help companies sell to government agencies, has closed a $22 million seed funding round. The lead investor is Mike Rosengarten, who co-founded OpenGov, a company that sells software directly to government customers. The round also drew backing from Bill Gurley at Benchmark and Jack Altman, co-founder of Lattice, according to Yahoo Finance.

The funding puts Pursuit in position to expand a platform that tackles one of the hardest problems in selling enterprise software: getting government agencies to buy your product. The company automates three major bottlenecks: generating documents that meet government rules, writing proposals, and registering as an approved vendor across multiple government systems.

Why Government Sales Are So Hard

Federal, state, and local agencies spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year on technology. But selling to them is notoriously difficult. The process moves slowly, requirements can be unclear, and you have to follow strict rules or your bid gets rejected outright. Many software companies either skip government business entirely or hire dedicated teams trained in the complexities of procurement rules.

Pursuit's platform tries to make government contracting more accessible by automating the administrative work. It generates proposals that follow the rules, manages vendor certifications, and tracks deals across different government websites. For sales teams used to selling to private companies, this removes obstacles that normally require either extensive training or hiring government-sales specialists.

The investor backing reflects confidence in the market and Pursuit's approach. Rosengarten's track record with OpenGov matters especially—he knows firsthand how government agencies adopt new technology. Gurley's involvement signals that this is a real enterprise software opportunity, while Altman's participation shows how traditional SaaS business models are expanding into specialized markets.

How Pursuit's Platform Works

Pursuit connects to existing sales tools and proposal software that companies already use. Rather than replacing what you have, it works alongside it. The system pulls contract opportunities from government websites like SAM.gov and FedBizOpps, then uses a technology called natural language processing (which allows software to understand and work with written language) to match what your company does with what the government is asking for.

The harder technical part is automating compliance. Government contracts require different certifications, security clearances, and documentation depending on which agency you're selling to and what type of contract it is. Pursuit builds this knowledge into its system, so it can automatically create the right documents for each type of deal.

Right now, some companies like GovWin and Deltek serve parts of this market, but most of them focus on one piece of the puzzle—either helping you find opportunities or helping you write proposals. Pursuit's bet is that nobody has really built a complete system that handles the whole process smoothly.

How We Got Here

Government agencies themselves have been modernizing slowly over the past decade. They've adopted digital marketplaces, streamlined their request-for-proposal processes, and said they want to buy cloud services. From the government buyer's perspective, this has made purchasing easier. But if you're a software company trying to sell to the government, the experience hasn't changed much. You still have to manually find opportunities, figure out what they want, and spend weeks or months putting together a compliant bid.

I've watched similar patterns in enterprise software before. When marketing automation emerged in the early 2000s, companies like Marketo made money by selling tools that let sales teams automate their own outreach. Before that, marketers and salespeople had to do everything manually. Once the tools existed, companies that used them gained a real advantage over those that didn't.

The same dynamic looks likely here. As government agencies continue adopting modern procurement processes and cloud-first policies, more contract opportunities become available and competition gets fiercer. Companies that can pursue government business systematically—rather than relying on specialists and relationships—will be at an advantage.

What Happens Next

The $22 million seed round is substantial because government sales automation requires serious expertise in compliance rules, regulatory knowledge, and the ability to plug into many different systems. Pursuit will likely spend much of this money on engineering and on signing up customers.

The specific investors also hint at a particular strategy. Gurley and Altman have deep connections across enterprise software companies. Rather than trying to sell directly to government agencies, Pursuit may focus on becoming a tool that existing enterprise software vendors use to add government customers to their sales pipeline.

The real test will come down to two things: whether Pursuit's compliance automation is accurate enough, and whether it covers enough opportunities to be genuinely useful. Government procurement is unforgiving—a single mistake can disqualify your bid. That means getting it right matters much more than being fast. If the platform misses opportunities or generates flawed documents, customers will lose trust quickly.

The timing appears to be working in Pursuit's favor. Federal agencies continue modernizing their IT systems and shifting to cloud services, while state and local governments are following the same trend. This expands the pool of agencies with modernized procurement systems that could benefit from automated tools.

For software companies looking to grow, Pursuit offers a potential path into a market that's been hard to access. The real question is whether automation can truly replace the specialized knowledge and relationships that have historically been required to sell to government. Once we see how the first customers do with the platform, we'll know whether this approach actually works at scale.