Customer Story
NationGraph maps the US public sector through Perplexity’s API
Search API and Deep Research API
Metrics
500,000+ Queries
350,000+ Smart Columns
10,000 hours of research saved
We really appreciate Perplexity’s ability to cite back sources so that we can go and double-check results and verify information.
Eden Ding, CTO of NationGraph
Founded in 2024, NationGraph is an intelligence platform transforming how businesses pursue government contracts. NationGraph addresses the "black box" of government contracting. While procurement data is technically public, it is often buried in fragmented meeting minutes, complex budget PDFs, and obscure websites across agencies. NationGraph, which has backing from the Perplexity Fund, indexes these sources to extract high-intent Signals and predictive buying insights.
The Task
For businesses trying to sell to US government agencies, getting data on their targets is difficult. While US federal data is often centralized, the state, local, and education sectors are an administrative labyrinth. With 100,000+ independent entities currently across US governments, including 12,000 school districts, there’s no standardized data structure.
NationGraph’s customers span education, public safety, transportation, cybersecurity and IT, and the finance and administration industries. Its platform is designed for revenue leaders, account executives, and sales development representatives doing research, looking to displace competitors, and/or validating budgets.
Before adopting Perplexity’s API, NationGraph faced three key challenges:
Fragmentation: Each municipality hosts its own transcripts, budgets, and meeting minutes on distinct web structures.
Research: Identifying simple details, such as the ERP software a city uses or the size of a local vehicle fleet, required hiring dozens of contractors to perform manual click-and-inspect research.
Limited tools: There’s no real infrastructure to analyze a county or a school district with the same granularity that Wall Street analysts use to evaluate public companies.
The Solution
Perplexity helps NationGraph build data pipelines into publicly accessible data that government entities publish. Specifically, NationGraph uses the Perplexity Search API and Deep Research API to offer a research engine for its customers, turning Perplexity into a core pillar of NationGraph’s research infrastructure. Unlike standard LLMs that might hallucinate, lose context, or provide outdated information, Perplexity works with NationGraph’s mapped universe of government entities, fueling NationGraph customer growth.
Each NationGraph user can thus run hundreds of parallel Perplexity-powered queries to find the specific information they need.
Key technical advantages:
Deep Research: NationGraph used Perplexity’s research capabilities to balance speed and cost. While other, more expensive models might take 20 minutes to produce a lengthier report, Perplexity delivered high-fidelity results 10x faster, in two to three minutes. That made it commercially viable for NationGraph to integrate Perplexity so that its users can use Perplexity directly in its product.
Source verification: Perplexity’s ability to cite specific government sources like filings, documents and meeting minutes was key. This allowed NationGraph to maintain a feedback loop to validate and maintain the accuracy of its results.
Handling complexity: Perplexity excelled at navigating paginated government websites and unstructured documents, extracting niche details that NationGraph’s customers are trying to understand. For example, Perplexity makes it possible for a NationGraph customer to find all municipal correctional facilities addresses, food schedules, and mailing regulations.
The Result
By offloading the heavy lifting of web-scale research to Perplexity, NationGraph is able to offer public sector intelligence faster and cheaper.
By the numbers:
500,000+ queries: NationGraph has run over half a million Perplexity-backed research queries to date.
350,000+ Smart Columns: These queries power the automated research layers within the NationGraph Workspace.
2 months saved: Integrating Perplexity’s search infrastructure saved the engineering team approximately two months of development time that it would have taken to build a custom web agent.
Days to minutes: For a NationGraph end-user, researching 300 institutions used to take days of manual clicking; it now takes less than two minutes.
Strategic impact:
Thanks to the Perplexity integration, NationGraph can focus more on its product. Instead of maintaining research infrastructure, its engineers focus on building product features that help vendors, agencies, and the public interface with a more transparent system. NationGraph and Perplexity have turned what were once "impossible" data projects into one-shot research runs.
"When our customers perform a search, NationGraph brings its data and Perplexity augments the public side of each query,” Eric says. “The end result is customers can save tens of thousands of dollars and months of time by asking just a handful of questions."