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Pursuit submits Freedom of Information Act requests at scale. Continuously. Under our own name. Across every level of state, local, and education government in the country.

This is the core of our data strategy, and it's the thing that separates us from every other govtech intelligence company.

"Public record" doesn't mean "accessible"

The U.S. government spends roughly $10 trillion a year. State and local alone account for nearly $4 trillion. The procurement data behind that spending — contract terms, pricing, vendor agreements, expiration dates — is technically public. Any citizen can request it.

But "any citizen can request it" and "anyone can access it" are completely different statements.

Getting a single FOIA response from a single municipality can take weeks. Some entities respond in days. Some take months. Some don't respond at all until you follow up. Multiply that by the tens of thousands of government entities in the U.S. and you start to understand why this data doesn't just exist in some database waiting to be scraped. It exists in filing cabinets, email inboxes, and PDF attachments — released one request at a time.

That's the gap. And gaps are where we build.

What we request

We don't submit FOIAs for meeting minutes or press releases. That stuff is usually online already.

We request the documents that actually matter for selling into government: full contract records with terms and pricing, contract end dates, vendor agreements, and service-level documentation. The kind of information that tells you exactly who has the deal, what they're charging, and when the door opens for competition.

Purchase orders are available through other channels. We go deeper. A purchase order tells you someone bought something. A contract tells you the full story — scope, duration, renewal terms, pricing structure. That's the difference between knowing a deal exists and knowing how to win the next one.

The pipeline

We built an engine that handles the full lifecycle: automated submission, response tracking, document intake, processing, indexing, and delivery into our signal pipeline.

That last part is where it gets interesting. A raw FOIA response is a PDF sitting in an inbox. Useful to one person, once. Our pipeline turns that document into structured intelligence — extracted entities, indexed content, searchable terms — that feeds directly into the procurement signals our customers use to find and win deals.

Every document that comes back makes the system smarter. The corpus compounds. A contract we received six months ago becomes a displacement signal today when that contract hits its expiration date.

What this unlocks

Contract end dates are the most underrated data point in govtech sales.

If you know when an incumbent's contract expires, you can time your outreach to land right when the government entity is legally required to consider alternatives. Without that date, you're cold calling into a multi-year lock and hoping for the best. With it, you're showing up at the exact moment competition is possible.

That's just one signal type. The full corpus enables competitive pricing analysis, vendor landscape mapping, and pattern detection across thousands of entities simultaneously. The government buyers aren't hiding this information. They're required to release it. Almost nobody asks.

FOIA as a product

We built the engine to feed our own platform. Then something happened that we didn't plan for: companies started asking if we'd submit FOIAs on their behalf.

Their sales teams were doing it manually. One rep, one request, one entity at a time. Personal email addresses. No tracking. No processing pipeline. Just PDFs accumulating in someone's inbox with no system to extract value from them.

So we turned the engine into a standalone product. You tell us what you need, from which entities, and we handle submission, tracking, processing, and delivery. The infrastructure we built for ourselves became a revenue line.

This is the pattern I keep coming back to: build the tool you need, then realize the tool is the product.

The moat

Most govtech data companies scrape bid boards, aggregate public postings, and repackage what's already available. The data is the same across all of them because the source is the same.

FOIA data is different. Every document in our corpus exists because we submitted a specific request to a specific entity and waited for the response. Nobody else has that document unless they submit the same request, wait the same timeline, and build the same infrastructure to process it at scale.

That's not a feature advantage. It's a structural one. Competitors can't buy this data. They can't scrape it. They can't partner their way into it. They have to build the same engine, submit the same volume of requests, and wait — starting from zero while our corpus continues to grow every day.

The real advantage

Govtech companies love to talk about their data. Coverage numbers, entity counts, document volumes. Those metrics matter, but they describe what you've collected, not what you've created.

The data advantage in govtech isn't what you can scrape. It's what you can ask for.