Founded by Nick Miller earlier this year, Pellucid Network is an enterprise procurement platform designed to simplify the software marketplace.
Miller said he wants to build a sustainable company in the Research Triangle region. But if you ask him what he thinks the company is turning into, that wouldn’t be his only answer.
“We think we’re building a new category of tech,” Miller said.
Put simply, Pellucid makes it easier for big companies to purchase new software through online marketplaces by better connecting the teams that find, vet and purchase that software with those that approve the purchases. This closes an internal gap in many companies that often slows down the process of integrating new software.
“Pellucid is building kind of a marketplace governance layer to help enterprises buy efficiently through what is the emerging marketplace economy,” Miller said.
Miller noted that about 10 years ago, seller-integration service that integrated software vendors into a marketplace pioneered a transformation in that marketplace.
Now, Pellucid wants to do the same for buyers.
“We believe marketplaces will be this future, and we believe there’ll be a whole class of technologies built for enterprises around [how] they manage the lifecycle of software and things built and bought through the marketplace,” Miller said. He added that Pellucid solves operational problems that slow down companies’ ability to efficiently take advantage of new software developments.
The startup does this by putting guardrails around what enterprise teams can actually access via the marketplace, then plumbing the data and transactions in support of the systems teams use to conduct day-to-day business.
Being able to keep up with the marketplace is time-consuming for companies. Miller said the APIs on marketplaces are constantly changing, and it’s unrealistic for IT systems to keep up to date.
“Every enterprise is trying to move faster, trying to do more with less, and so by kind of unifying the purchasing cycle, but also decentralizing knowledge of what tools are approved, which tools are not approved, enterprises can innovate faster,” Miller said.
Finding real problems to fix
The problems Pellucid is setting out to solve are ones Miller has observed throughout his professional life.
Miller began his career as an officer in the U.S. Army, working in internal communications before becoming the Chief Information Officer for Arlington National Cemetery in 2010.
During his time as CIO, he launched the first Department of War mobile app—something he says sparked his interest in transitioning to technology and software development. From there, Miller joined In-Q-Tel, a venture firm that invests in defense technology and was notably an early investor in Palantir.
Miller started seeing the same problem at In-Q-Tel that ultimately led him to start Pellucid.
“In large enterprises, how do you ingest technology fast enough so that you’re kind of a fast follower, and you’re not kind of adopting lagging technology?,” Miller queried.
With this problem in mind, he began working with Amazon Web Services, and in particular on the development of the marketplace for the public sector.
He said his time working in and with government contracts highlighted the need for a faster way for government agencies to meet their software needs.
“The government struggles to direct contract with these small innovative vendors. It’s just like there’s a fundamental mismatch, and the large vendors that the government traditionally works with struggled to kind of bring them in cost-effective,” Miller said.
The public sector portion of the AWS marketplace grew exponentially and rapidly, but Miller said he still saw the challenges public agencies and healthcare systems face attempting to access technologies through a marketplace—one of the key problems Pellucid helps solve.
At In-Q-Tel, Miller said he saw large companies try to navigate being good customers to early-stage technology companies, but that these attempts often failed due to the logistical complications of trying to test new technology.
“What ends up happening is the innovation cycle of the enterprise slows because a lot of people who may have good ideas, they just don’t move forward on them because they don’t know how, or they’ve tried before [and] it’s too painful… procurement kind of creates this internal friction to kind of bring innovation to life,” Miller said.
First launch, financing, and the future
Pellucid is an early-stage, pre-seed startup that launched in 2026. It received its first round of venture capital funding this summer.
Pellucid participated in the third Launch Powered by KPMG accelerator cohort in the spring of this year and received an investment from the Tweener Fund, powered by NC IDEA.
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Startup: Pellucid Network, Inc.
Co-Founders: Nick Miller, Hakjae Kim
Founded: 2026
Team size: 3
Location: Cary
Website: pellucidnetwork.com
Funding: Raised pre-seed
Pellucid is planning a limited-access, free trial to give businesses a chance to try out the service, but Miller said the product will operate with a standard Saas-based subscription model based on the complexity of the marketplace, likely starting at $20,000 and scaling as the tasks get more complex.
The startup currently has its first round of beta clients that Miller said will hopefully convert to subscriptions. He added that the company is working on its first set of government contracts that he expects to hit in the fourth quarter of this year, but he anticipates 2027 being Pellucid’s first year hitting revenue goals.
As a pre-seed startup with a team of three, though, Miller said Pellucid’s main focus right now is on perfecting the product.
“More than just revenue goals, and we have some, it’s customer validation to allow us to get to the next stage of financing and the next fundraising game,” Miller said.
