Today’s a good day: Our portfolio company Starbridge closed a $42M Series A led by Craft Ventures. We proudly participated in the round alongside Owl Ventures and Autotech.
Craft is exactly the right partner for this stage of Starbridge's journey. Their track record supporting unicorns like SpaceX and Anduril will be invaluable as Starbridge’s founder Justin Wenig and his team build the next great AmTech company.
We participated in Starbridge's seed round in February 2025 and have been impressed by the team's execution ever since.
Starbridge is the right company for the right moment
U.S. government spending represents a $7T market opportunity, and yet most startups avoid it.
When Starbridge’s founder Justin Wenig went through Y Combinator in 2019 with his first company, Coursedog, only 4 out of 200 companies in his batch were building for government.
It’s true that government sales can be hard. Information is scattered across tens of thousands of agencies; procurement rules vary by jurisdiction; compliance can be difficult. As a result, 40% of government contracts get only one bid. Without competition, taxpayers pay higher costs and there is little incentive for bidders to innovate.
This is a problem that the private sector can help the public sector solve, and that’s exactly what Starbridge is doing now by simplifying how companies discover and compete for public sector opportunities. Their platform monitors board meetings, budget discussions, contract expirations, grant awards, and personnel changes across 90,000+ agencies. Then it tells you what to do about it. If a school district discusses cybersecurity in a board meeting. Starbridge flags it, identifies the IT director, drafts an email, and syncs everything to your CRM.
Why we invested
We met Justin in late 2024. Four things stood out.
- Justin knows the market. Seven years of building CourseDog and selling to higher education and state agencies gave him domain expertise most founders don't have. He came back after a successful exit to solve the problem he'd lived: it’s too hard to find and win government contracts right now.
- Justin is a killer founder who also has a sense of public mission. In order to work productively with partners in government, you have to understand the way that people in government think and why they make the decisions that they do. Justin knows that for these stakeholders, Starbridge’s value proposition is helping government deliver the best outcomes for the American people.
- The TAM is enormous, and starting with the State, Local, and Educational (SLED) market would give Starbridge key advantages. There are 90,000 state and local agencies and education departments that collectively procure hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of goods each year. That’s 90,000 individual customers with different buying criteria, changing personnel, and procurement rules. Starbridge’s product tackles that challenge head-on. GTM teams in SLED now have sales weapons they never had before. We thought, and continue to think, that Starbridge can build a generational company in this market.
- The timing is right. Government efficiency is a political priority for both Democrats and Republicans. Agencies need to demonstrate responsible stewardship of taxpayer money. Starbridge helps them attract competitive bids while helping vendors compete fairly. Both sides win.
Today Starbridge is already being used by 160+ enterprise public sector sales teams, including Instructure, SimpliGov, and Clever, to identify public sector opportunities before the RFP.
We're excited to continue supporting Justin and the team over the coming months and years as they continue their exceptional momentum and scale with this new capital.
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