Why We Invested in Starbridge

We’re excited to lead the $42M Series A round in Starbridge.ai, the AI-powered intelligence platform for companies selling into state, local government, and educational (SLED) institutions. Zac Bookman (OpenGov) and Michael Seibel (Y Combinator), as well as existing investors Owl Ventures, Autotech Ventures, and Commonweal Ventures, are joining us in this round to support Starbridge on their journey to help companies service the American public sector.

When Justin Wenig, Founder and CEO, was previously building Coursedog, he experienced the frustration of selling to SLED firsthand. From combing through hundreds of pages of meeting minutes to manually requesting data through FOIA requests, Justin and his team were spending hours just to figure out who to reach out to. With AI and LLMs becoming increasingly powerful in distilling down data sets, Justin decided to build the product he wished he had at Coursedog, which ultimately led to the genesis of Starbridge. We’ve known Justin for a while and he’s an absolute force. From our first meeting, we knew Justin had the perfect combination of domain expertise, product intuition, and founder grit to build something truly transformative. Having lived the pain point and built a successful company before, Justin brings rare insight and intensity to redefine how companies access, interpret, and act on public-sector data.

The annual US SLED budget is massive, accounting for ~10% of US GDP at nearly $2 trillion and spanning across tens of thousands of entities from states, municipalities, and counties. SLED institutions often contract private sector organizations to serve the public in areas such as IT, education, and healthcare. However, they are met with a complex web of data, procurement processes, cooperative purchase agreements, and manual workflows such as FOIA requests to win SLED contracts. This has made it challenging for even the best vendors and has limited healthy competition to service the American public. Starbridge solves this problem by empowering every company with the ability to discover and win these opportunities.

Starbridge’s comprehensive platform for SLED procurement uses AI agents to gather data from public records (e.g. RFPs, meeting minutes) and automates traditionally manual workflows like FOIA requests. This allows customers to access highly tailored intelligence that would otherwise be expensive. Simultaneously, it creates a data flywheel with more users submitting FOIA requests, and a growing contract dataset. Using LLMs, Starbridge distills this growing dataset into actionable insights that save sales teams hours of research time. Since its launch in early 2025, Starbridge has grown rapidly to 150+ customers. When we spoke with customers, the theme that was echoed was “exceptional ROI.” Starbridge reduces hours of manual work, all while surfacing signals that enable users to significantly accelerate their ability to find and win high-value contracts.

Starbridge is quickly becoming an essential part of companies’ SLED sales strategy and we couldn’t be more thrilled to partner with Justin and the Starbridge team.