In Washington, DC, a small team is trying to rewire the on-ramp into the American workforce. They are starting at the high school cafeteria, not the college career fair.
The company is GoPursue, founded by Kathryn Adabonyan. Its pitch to employers is straightforward: stop fishing for entry-level hires from the same crowded pools, and start meeting pre-screened high school graduates who actually want the job [Crunchbase].
On the student side, GoPursue is a career exploration app for 15- to 22-year-olds. It is a place to learn what jobs exist, talk to professionals who hold them, and find local openings [LinkedIn].
On the employer side, it is a B2B SaaS hiring channel for high-need entry-level roles [Crunchbase]. The two sides are the same product. This is the bet.
The bet
Most early-career hiring tools assume a four-year degree somewhere in the funnel. GoPursue is built on a different premise.
A meaningful share of high school graduates are ready to work. They want a path that does not route through tuition debt. They would take a serious entry-level role if someone vouched for them and walked them to the door.
The product matches employers with what the company calls career-direct graduates. These are students who have already done the exploration, mentor conversations, and local employer discovery inside the platform [GoPursue]. By the time a hiring manager sees a candidate, the candidate has context.
That is the wedge. The platform is described as fueling economic mobility and local workforce development starting in high school [Crunchbase]. This is also the language that tends to attract civic and workforce partners.
GoPursue is listed as a partner on Serve DC's volunteer infrastructure [Serve DC]. This is a small signal but a real one for a company whose distribution depends on getting inside school districts and community organizations.
Why it could be big
The macro story here is favorable. Employers across logistics, healthcare support, hospitality, retail operations, and skilled trades are still struggling to fill entry-level seats.
A growing chorus of HR leaders has publicly committed to skills-based hiring. Several Fortune 500s have dropped degree requirements for thousands of roles in the last three years.
If those commitments hold, the bottleneck shifts from credentialing to sourcing. Sourcing pre-screened 18-year-olds at scale is exactly the surface area GoPursue is trying to own.
The company closed roughly $500,000 in pre-seed funding to chase that opening [SignalBase]. The round size is modest. It is consistent with what an early B2B SaaS company building two-sided supply (students and employers) typically raises before it has a repeatable sales motion.
Adabonyan has been on stage pitching the thesis publicly. This includes a Press Play 2023 appearance describing GoPursue as an app that helps high school and college students figure out which jobs they want and connects them to mentors in those industries [YouTube].
Pre-seed raised | 0.5 | $M
Employees | 4 | count
(Mixed units shown for context only; the figures come from separate disclosures.)
| Metric | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Disclosed funding to date | ~$500,000 pre-seed | SignalBase |
| Headcount | 4 | RocketReach |
| Target user age range | 15 to 22 | |
| HQ | Washington, DC | Crunchbase |
The team and traction
Adabonyan is CEO and founder [Crunchbase]. Public commentary from a former marketing and communications intern describes her as the architect of a mentor network platform for K-12 students. It credits her with running a structured intern program [LinkedIn].
The company is now hiring its first full-time employees. This includes an Account Executive to build out the B2B SaaS sales function, according to a post from venture operator Kerrin Kinnear [LinkedIn].
RocketReach lists current headcount at four [RocketReach]. That is a deliberately small footprint for a pre-seed company. The AE hire is the tell: GoPursue is moving from founder-led selling into a real outbound motion to school districts and regional employers.
The product surface
The product surface is also broader than a job board. Innovations of the World describes GoPursue as helping high school students explore career options, connect with professionals, and discover work opportunities with local employers [Innovations of the World].
That three-part loop, exploration, mentorship, placement, is what gives the company a defensible reason to sit inside a school for years rather than weeks.
The honest counterfactual
What bears will say: building two-sided marketplaces in education is hard. The entry-level hiring category is crowded with general-purpose platforms like Indeed, Handshake, and a long tail of state and regional workforce boards.
A pre-seed company with four employees and roughly half a million dollars in the bank has limited runway. It must prove that employers will pay a SaaS fee for high school talent specifically, when free or near-free alternatives exist [Crunchbase].
Retention is also a real question. 18-year-olds in first jobs churn at high rates across every channel. Employers will measure GoPursue against that benchmark.
What bulls will answer: those general-purpose platforms are not pre-screening candidates by career interest. They are not embedded in high schools. They are not selling the workforce development narrative that wins district contracts and civic partnerships.
GoPursue's entire product is the screening layer and the relationship with the student before the application [GoPursue]. If the company can show even modest evidence that its placements stick longer than cold applicants from a generic board, the unit economics for an employer customer change quickly.
What to watch
The next twelve months are about three things.
First, the AE hire announced via Kinnear's network needs to convert into a named anchor employer customer. This should be one regional enough to reference and large enough to renew [LinkedIn].
Second, GoPursue will need to publish placement and retention data, even directional. This will give the workforce development thesis something to stand on.
Third, watch for a seed round in the $2 million to $4 million range. That is the typical next step for a DC-area B2B SaaS company that lands its first repeatable contracts off a $500,000 pre-seed [SignalBase].
The ambition is real and the timing is interesting. The harder question is whether a four-person team in Washington can convince enough employers, fast enough, that the kid who skipped college is the hire they have been missing.
Which district, and which employer, signs the reference contract first?