Gurley Bets $22M That Government Sales Hasn't Already Failed

Pursuit, a startup dedicated to helping companies navigate government sales, just closed a $22 million Series A led by Mike Rosengarten, co-founder of OpenGov. The round includes Bill Gurley and Jack Altman, two names with enough credibility to make this look like a serious bet on enterprise software. It is not.

The premise is eternal: procurement is broken, therefore a smart software platform can fix it. This insight has motivated roughly 1,000 failed startups since the internet began. Government agencies have procurement rules because Congress wrote them. No Series A is rewriting federal acquisition regulations. Rosengarten should know this—OpenGov made $200 million in revenue partly by helping agencies comply with the very rules Pursuit intends to bypass.

The pitch writes itself: 'We've built a better mousetrap for B2G sales.' Translation: we have a database and a dashboard. Gurley and Altman are betting that this time—unlike every other time—the mousetrap works. Their confidence is touching. The government's glacial decision-making timeline will remain glacial. The amount of paperwork will not decrease. The margins, however, will vanish.

When Pursuit's burn rate catches up with its TAM assumptions in 24 months, we'll see if Gurley has any comments about the regulatory environment's role in the failure.