Bill Gurley, Jack Altman back startup Pursuit, which helps…
His parents were teachers, his uncle was in the FBI, while both sets of grandparents served in the Army. “Growing up, 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. 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, and requests for proposal from every state, school district, county, city, and special district across the nation. “We turn fragmented public data into fully researched opportunities,” he said. He said the customer is any company that sells to public service agencies and described Pursuit as an “AI clone of themselves, making sure they know everything that’s happening across every account in their patch.” Others in this space include Starbridge, GovSpend, and Deltek GovWin IQ.
Vichich said he hopes Pursuit can help make SLED contract opportunities more transparent and accessible. “The data has always been public, that’s the irony,” he said. It’s just that this data is buried across thousands upon thousands of websites, lost in PDFs and meeting videos. “The cost of finding and parsing it has historically been too high relative to the value of any signal contract,” he continued. “Pursuit is the layer that turns sunlight into something useful.” This piece was updated to clarify the job Vichich’s uncle had and the round this was. OpenAI ends Microsoft legal peril over its $50B Amazon deal Two college kids raise a $5.1 million pre-seed to build an AI social network in iMessage Meta’s loss is Thinking Machines’ gain Google to invest up to $40B in Anthropic in cash and compute OpenAI releases GPT-5.5, bringing company one step closer to an AI ‘super app’ Microsoft offers buyout for up to 7% of US employees Surveillance vendors caught abusing access to telcos to track people’s phone locations, researchers say
Analysis: Why This Matters
When companies make decisions involving Bill Gurley, the ripple effects often hit competitors, investors, and consumers within weeks.
Key Takeaways
- 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.
- On Wednesday, it announced a $22 million Series A round led by Mike Rosengarten, the co-founder of OpenGov.
- Register now for unfiltered fireside chats and VC insights with leaders from Uber, Replit, Eclipse, and more.
We'll track responses from analysts, regulators, and rival companies as they come in.
Source: TechCrunch