NationGraph, a company that collects data and intelligence for those suppliers, has raised $18 million in a Series A funding round led by Menlo Ventures. Perplexity's Fund, XYZ Venture Capital, Reach Capital and angel investors also took part.
Total funding for the company, which launched in 2024, stands at $22.5 million.
The company’s sales pitch goes like this: Its “AI-native intelligence platform” collects information and “signals” from state, regional and local agencies — including schools and special districts — and provides that data to suppliers.
By the company’s count, that market includes more than 110,000 agencies that have different budget and purchasing cycles, and whose specific information about contracts and supply needs is spread all over the place instead of in a single source.
Minutes, meeting agendas, budget plans, strategic documents, RFPs — all of those sources are just waiting to be mined by artificial intelligence to help suppliers better plan proposals and pitches.
NationGraph is not the only tech firm eager to provide such a platform. Late last year, for instance, Starbridge, which sells similar services to the public sector, raised $42 million as artificial intelligence moves further into procurement.
Even so, this part of the gov tech world is relatively unexplored, according to NationGraph CEO and co-founder Kimia Hamidi.
“This is a dramatically underserved space,” he told Government Technology. “It’s a fragmented and large landscape.”
He said his previous experience in procurement, e-commerce, a rewards network and product marketing informs his work with NationGraph, with a main theme of his career being “how to make pricing data more accessible.”
Hamidi said inspiration also comes from Shopify, whose e-commerce platform helps businesses build and operate online stores — making it possible for many smaller operations to reach a wider group of customers via digital channels.
He said doing so in public-sector procurement — that is, gathering all that intelligence and serving it up in a central location — would be impossible without artificial intelligence. Such information can include the types of purchases made in the past by agencies and the vendors they used.
"We started NationGraph because we saw firsthand how information asymmetry determines who wins government contracts,” Hamidi said.
The fresh capital will go toward hiring engineers and go-to-market professionals.
"We're proud to lead NationGraph's Series A as they bring transparency to the broken process of government procurement,” said Croom Beatty, partner at Menlo Ventures, in a statement. “Government sales is an incredibly messy and opaque process with data locked up in countless portals, unstructured documents and tribal knowledge.”
