Pavilion buys the boring stuff better.

There is a rule of thumb in technology that the best businesses hide inside the workflows nobody wants to touch. Pavilion touched public procurement, which is arguably the most untouchable workflow of all. Buying things for a city or a school district is slow by law, wrapped in compliance requirements, and haunted by the possibility of an audit. It is exactly the sort of thing that makes a normal person's eyes glaze over, which is precisely why almost nobody had bothered to fix it.

Here is the trick Pavilion built its company around. When a city runs a competitive bid and awards a contract, that contract is often legally reusable by other public agencies - a practice the procurement world affectionately calls "piggybacking" or cooperative purchasing. In theory, a county in one state can buy from a vendor using a contract a school district in another state already competed. In practice, finding those contracts meant emails, PDFs, phone calls, and hope.

Pavilion made them searchable. That is the whole idea, and it is a bigger idea than it sounds. If one agency's homework can become another agency's shortcut, then every completed procurement becomes a small piece of public infrastructure. Multiply that across hundreds of agencies and tens of thousands of contracts, and you have something that looks less like a government form and more like e-commerce.

The company started in 2018 as CoProcure, founded by Mariel Reed and Alicia Chen. Reed had worked inside San Francisco City Hall as an innovation strategist, where she watched public servants re-run competitions that had already been won elsewhere. She did not write a memo about it. She built a startup. In 2023 the company rebranded to Pavilion and expanded beyond pure cooperative purchasing toward making procurement easier across every buying method.

The economics are the fun part. Pavilion is free for governments. Buyers pay nothing to search, discover vendors, or reuse contracts. The money is on the supplier side: vendors who have already won a public contract can surface it, share it, and reach hundreds of additional public buyers without starting the sales cycle from scratch. Give one side the tool, monetize the other, and let the network do the work.

It is a patient business - government does not move fast, and neither does trust - but the numbers suggest the thesis is real. More than 300 agencies activated, 50,000-plus reusable contracts, and over $100 million in annualized purchasing volume flowing across the platform, with the kind of buyer retention that only shows up when a product actually saves people time.