Winning Government Business: HighGround Market Founder & CEO John Price, Live at NYSE
Watch the interview below, or click HERE : IPO Edge hosted a fireside chat on June 2 from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange with John Price, Founder and Chief Executive Officer at HighGround Market. The in-person interview was joined by Editor-at-Large Jarrett Banks and t
IPO Edge hosted a fireside chat on June 2 from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange with John Price, Founder and Chief Executive Officer at HighGround Market. The in-person interview was joined by Editor-at-Large Jarrett Banks and they discussed the importance of predictive analytics on government spending, the new emerging markets and what it takes to win government business, among other topics.
Defense is the last major asset class without an intelligence layer. Defense has emerged as one of the most contested and capital-intensive markets in private equity and venture. Yet, the decision-makers allocating capital into the sector, and the companies competing inside it, are still making billion-dollar decisions on expert intuition, fragmented government databases, and institutional memory. HighGround was built on the conviction that this operating model is no longer good enough.
HighGround is led by Co-Founder and CEO, John Price, former Green Beret and Senate defense and technology policy advisor, who spent years as the go-to diligence resource for defense-focused private equity and venture capital firms before founding the company.
"The defense market is large enough, transparent enough, and consequential enough to deserve the same analytical foundation that fixed income, equity research, and private credit have had for decades," said Price. "The government tells you exactly what it's going to buy, when, and from whom. What's been missing is the infrastructure to turn that signal into conviction, and that's exactly what we built."
HighGround replaces a stack of fragmented tools with one source of truth purpose-built for the defense and aerospace market.
Investors get recompete risk, revenue quality, market concentration, and budget trajectory modeled continuously. Diligence is delivered in days instead of months, with risks surfaced before close rather than after.
Operators get contracting officer behavior, office spending forecasts, and pre-signal 12-18 months before an opportunity goes public, so BD teams pursue the right contracts, not just the visible ones.
Sell-side and advisors get a single, continuously updated model of the defense market, AI-native and integrated with leading models including Claude and ChatGPT, so coverage and client briefs stop being built by hand.
