NationGraph vs Starbridge: SLED Sales Intelligence (2026)

How two SLED sales intelligence platforms compare on signal depth, FOIA automation, and what it takes to turn a public record into pipeline.

NationGraph is built for government sales teams that win state, local, and education (SLED) deals on competitor contract intelligence. The platform reads eleven distinct public data sources against roughly 110,000 institutions, resolves everything to one standardized institution record, and runs public records collection as automated infrastructure that returns parsed competitor contract fields directly to your CRM. Starbridge publishes a larger entity count and sells cooperative contract vehicle access on top of its data. If your team needs to know which district is about to buy, who the incumbent vendor is, what they are paying, and when the contract ends, that is the specific problem NationGraph was built to solve.

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What does NationGraph do that Starbridge does not?

Public records collection as infrastructure

NationGraph batches, routes, and rate-manages FOIA requests and state public records equivalents across institutions automatically. Responses come back parsed into structured fields, the incumbent, the annual value, the term, and the renewal window, and push to Salesforce or HubSpot.

Every contract collected persists in a corpus the next query hits first. So the common case is an immediate answer, not a request and a wait.

Starbridge runs FOIA as done-for-you campaigns, a services motion with a queue and a scope conversation in front of it. Ours is a button in the product. When a rep needs the incumbent's pricing on Tuesday to run a displacement play on Wednesday, that difference is the whole deal.

Institution resolution that holds up in a CRM

Every signal, contact, contract, and purchase order in NationGraph resolves to one institution record mapped to standardized identifiers, including NCES codes for K-12 and higher education. Palm Beach County School District and PBC Schools are one account, not two rows that never reconcile.

Starbridge does not publicly specify how it resolves institutions.

Procurement rules as a first-class source

NationGraph reads how each institution is permitted to buy: sole-source thresholds, when a cooperative purchasing contract is required, what triggers a full solicitation. Knowing an institution wants to buy is half the qualification. Knowing how it is allowed to buy tells a rep whether the deal is a three-week close or a six-month bid. No other platform in this category treats that as a tracked data source.

Meeting video, not just published minutes

Minutes are a summary written after the fact, and they routinely omit the useful part. NationGraph reads the recorded meeting itself. The line where a CFO says the filter contract ends in December is often in the video and nowhere in the minutes.

An MCP server that exposes the database

All eleven data sources are exposed through the Model Context Protocol with per-source access gating and an authentication flow built to Anthropic's and OpenAI's verified connector standard, now in pilot with customers ahead of general release. A rep asks a question in the AI tool they already use and gets a sourced answer from the underlying government procurement records, not from a set of pre-built pushes someone anticipated.

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Does a larger entity count mean better SLED coverage?

No, and it is the most misread number in government sales intelligence.

Entity count measures rows in a table, and it depends entirely on what a vendor decides to count. A mosquito abatement district with no procurement staff counts as one entity. So does Los Angeles Unified. A bigger total built from more sub-entities does not put a single additional dollar of addressable spend in your territory.

The number that changes a rep's day is how many sources are read against each institution that can actually buy. NationGraph pulls eleven source types across roughly four million public websites for 110,000 institutions. Starbridge counts entities. We count what we know about each one.

Run the test yourself. Load fifty accounts you already know into both platforms and check three things: does each resolve to one clean record, how many distinct sources produced a signal, and is the signal specific enough to open a call with.

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NationGraph vs Starbridge at a glance

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Where does Starbridge fit better?

Two situations, stated plainly so you do not waste a cycle. If deals stall because the buyer has chosen you and cannot transact without a cooperative purchasing vehicle, Starbridge resells that access and NationGraph does not. And if you want proposal drafting inside the same tool, they have it, though most teams already own that workflow elsewhere.

Neither is a signal quality argument. Both are adjacent services, priced accordingly.

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Which platform is right for your team?

Choose NationGraph if competitor contract intelligence is how you qualify, you need public records collection to run as infrastructure rather than a service request, your CRM depends on institutions resolving to one clean record, you want to know how an institution is permitted to buy, or you want your team querying the source database from their AI tools.

Choose Starbridge if your primary unsolved problem is transacting through a cooperative contract vehicle rather than finding and shaping the deal.

Vendors running this motion on NationGraph include Harris, Grainger, Gaggle, NVIDIA, Ramp, Verbit, Cofense, Ouster, Incident IQ, FlexPoint, InformedK12, Ativion, Kami, Resi, RTA, First Due, 4Mativ, U.S. Medical Staffing, Care Solace, and RocketLit.