Tango: What We're Building and Why

The US Government spends trillions of dollars over millions of transactions with hundreds of thousands of organizations. As part of that process, the government has generated an enormous amount of data, stretching across decades. And almost all of it is trapped in systems that were never designed to talk to each other or were never really designed to be used by someone outside of the government.

We started Tango because we lived this problem. Over the years, we built tools for government contractors and spent more time fighting government data sources than building features. Every project starts the same way: scrape SAM.gov, download USASpending, parse FPDS, reconcile entity records across three systems, bring in other datasets, and pray nothing breaks when an agency changes its data format. And even then, we'd find data that was obviously and often hilariously wrong.

We figured: "if we are doing this, everyone is doing this." We were right.

So, we got to work on Tango.

Tango is a unified API for federal procurement data. We take the messy, inconsistent, poorly documented data scattered across dozens of government systems and turn it into something a developer can actually build on. Clean schemas. Predictable queries. Data modeled the way people think about procurement, not the way government databases happen to store it.

We're not building a dashboard. We're not building a search engine. We're building infrastructure: the plumbing that sits underneath the next generation of tools, agents, and workflows that help people work with the federal government. We want Tango to be the first place you look if you're building something that needs to know about a contract, an opportunity, a vendor, or an agency. And we want your users to be blissfully unaware of the complexities of wrangling the data, because we modeled it in a way that makes sense.

We think the right way to do this is with an API-first, AI-native approach. Not because those are good buzzwords, but because the way people interact with data is changing. The next analyst researching a recompete might not open a browser, they'll ask an AI agent. That agent needs a structured, reliable data layer underneath it. We're building that layer, and we are building that layer to meet the demands of a rapidly changing landscape.

We're a small team. We don't have the marketing budget of the incumbents or the headcount of the big platforms. What we have is deep domain knowledge, a modern technical stack, and a pricing model that doesn't punish you for letting your whole team use the product.

Here's the thing, though: we don't consider those companies to be competition. The more good tools that people build, the better. What's been missing is a strong foundation upon which to build good tools. Every company in this space shouldn't have to independently solve the same set of problems.

Our ambition is simple: make federal procurement data so easy to work with that nobody ever has to build their own government data pipeline again. We're not done yet. But every dataset we normalize, every cross-reference we resolve, and every endpoint we ship gets us closer.

We are already helping; companies with established products and existing customers are choosing to bring Tango into their stack instead of struggling with their own pipelines. We want to see that pattern repeat across the whole ecosystem and, by doing so, improve the ecosystem.

If you're building in this space, we'd love to hear from you. And if you're not building yet but you're curious, the free tier is there for a reason.

Build something. We'll handle the data.