NationGraph: Leveling the Playing Field in Government Procurement

When you picture selling products and services to the government, what comes to mind is an old boy’s network of cigars, rounds of golf, and opaque backroom dealing. And, realistically, that’s how most government procurement historically has worked. You have tribal, institutional knowledge and long-term relationships that ultimately make it difficult for new vendors to break in and lead to less competitive and transparent buying processes (and much worse experiences for constituents). If you’ve ever tried to book a campsite or pay your property tax online, it’s hard to believe that we are in the same country that put a man on the moon or is at the cutting edge of AI.

NationGraph is seeking to end this information asymmetry by bringing transparency and automation to the government procurement process. If you break down a sale into its component parts, a vendor needs to know the following: what contracts are relevant, what is the timing, who are the key stakeholders, and how to navigate the end procurement process. However, that data sits in millions of unstructured files, portals, board meeting minutes, and budgets, and is impossible for most teams to have even a keyhole view into the broader aperture of what is addressable as an opportunity. 

NationGraph uses LLMs to build a dynamic data map that allows vendors to see, in real time, the most relevant and timely opportunities by pulling in data from over 100,000 state, local, and educational entities. They bolster that data with key stakeholder contact information, competitive intelligence on previous successful bids, and a clear lineage of how to trace a sale from start to finish through myriad, bespoke processes at the government level. Then, NationGraph goes a step further by marrying that system of intelligence with a system of action, automating everything from sales outreach to account-based marketing for target accounts.

We first met Kimia Hamidi when he was at Ramp and were impressed by how he thinks about using previously inaccessible data to unlock value. When he set out to disrupt how companies sell to the government, we loved NationGraph’s tight customer alignment and the immediate, outsized  ROI that NationGraph delivers, often from a single contract. 

One of our frameworks for evaluating outlier growth potential hinges upon three inputs: ease of selling a product, depth of market, and ability to drive large contracts. Ease of selling is easiest when the product is directly aligned with revenue generation for a customer; NationGraph’s value prop is pretty immediate, as sales reps see leads funnel into their dashboard on a regular cadence. On depth of market, hundreds of thousands of customers sell to the government, and we believe NationGraph can unlock a massive shadow market of demand from companies that have never had the tools or knowledge to do so. And by shifting from a system of intelligence to a system of action, NationGraph is beginning to build the plumbing to manage that sales process from end to end, allowing it to become the transaction layer between vendors and buyers where it can share in the revenue upside that it is driving.

Trillions of dollars flow through these legacy, murky procurement processes today. We are thrilled to be leading NationGraph’s Series A as they build an AI-native, end-to-end procurement platform to make this process better and more fair for vendors, buyers, and the taxpayers who ultimately deserve to have access to the best products and services from their government.