public-sector-sales
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Kimia Hamidi and the price of knowing
He once called friends to find out what their software cost. After selling Buyer to Ramp, Kimia Hamidi is turning the same curiosity toward the paperwork behind government purchases.
The Contract Was Hiding in the Inbox
Govly began with a dull discovery: valuable government bids were arriving as email, and the people who could answer them were scattered across companies. Its answer is a searchable market network, built around who can actually get a bid to the buyer.
Peter Ostrow Built a Career in the Unfashionable Middle
Before marketplaces became a default business model, Peter Ostrow was turning product specifications, federal rules and sales logistics into an online buying system. His career is a study in making complicated markets usable.
Technical Communities
Technical Communities, Inc. (TCI) is a San Mateo, California holding company founded in 1999 that helps technology manufacturers sell into government markets and helps government buyers find the equipment they need at the price they want. It combines GSA contract management and public-sector go-to-market services with a family of e-commerce marketplaces - TestMart, GSAmart, NAVICPmart, ITmart, MedMart and CloudMart - that handle quoting, order management and compliant fulfillment for federal, state, local and commercial buyers of test-and-measurement, IT, medical and cloud products.
The Signal Before the Siren: How NationGraph Reads a Government's Mind
Signals is NationGraph's buying-trigger engine for companies selling to state, local, education and defense (SLED) buyers. It aggregates thousands of public sector data sources - budgets, RFPs, board meeting minutes, grant awards, contract renewals and personnel changes - and converts them into scored, ranked opportunities that surface before a formal RFP is ever published. The result is delivered daily, organized by account, and synced into Salesforce, HubSpot and Slack so sellers can act on intent instead of waiting for the bid.
Starbridge
Starbridge is a New York-based AI go-to-market platform built for companies selling to government and education. It scrapes the messy, fragmented world of public sector data - board meeting minutes, budgets, RFPs, contract expirations and procurement records - and turns it into ranked buying signals, account intelligence and auto-drafted proposals so sales teams can find and win deals before the RFP drops. Founded in 2024 by Coursedog veteran Justin Wenig, it has raised $52M total, including a $42M Series A led by Craft Ventures in October 2025, and serves 160+ enterprise public sector sales teams.
Justin Wenig
Justin Wenig is the founder and CEO of Starbridge, a New York AI company that helps businesses find and win public-sector contracts. He earlier co-founded Coursedog, a higher-education operations platform he scaled to 300+ institutions before a nine-figure sale to JMI Equity in 2021. A Columbia computer science grad and Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, he raised a $42M Series A led by Craft Ventures in October 2025 and angel-invests in 50+ AI startups on the side.