In the United States, regulation is a trillion-dollar problem hiding in plain sight. Government agencies, legal professionals, and corporations spend vast resources every year navigating an increasingly bloated, fragmented, and outdated system of laws. But what if artificial intelligence could read, interpret, and streamline all of it — from congressional statutes to obscure executive orders?
That’s the bet Vulcan Technologies is making.
Founded earlier this year and headquartered in Austin, Texas, the reg-tech startup has just announced a $10.9 million seed round, co-led by General Catalyst and Cubit Capital, with backing from a notable cast: SV Angel, Liquid 2 Ventures, Y Combinator, 468 Capital, and Trevor Rees-Jones, the billionaire energy executive behind Chief Oil & Gas.
The investor excitement is rooted in what Vulcan is building: an AI-native legal infrastructure platform that ingests every federal and state statute, regulation, case law, and executive order, and transforms that tangled ecosystem into a navigable, logic-mapped database. Its proprietary “legal cartography” models the relationships between these nodes — showing, for instance, how an executive order nullifies a regulation, or how case law has altered a statute’s enforceability.
“We’re solving an urgent structural problem confronting U.S. competitiveness: the broken regulatory system,” said Tanner Jones, co-founder and CEO of Vulcan Technologies. “With this seed round, we’re scaling a world-class engineering team, expanding into the private sector, and helping American builders navigate and reform regulation at scale.”
Automating Law, One Statute at a Time
Vulcan’s platform is not a search engine, nor is it just another LLM-powered chatbot with legal data. Its backend operates more like a knowledge graph of the U.S. legal system — linking upstream and downstream dependencies so users can understand the full lifecycle of a regulation. Whether it’s a startup designing a product in a highly regulated space or a federal agency trying to streamline outdated codes, Vulcan acts as an AI-native policy assistant.
The company already counts the Virginia Office of Regulatory Management, the U.S. Department of Education, and South Carolina Department of Government and Ethics (DOGE) among its customers. In Virginia, Vulcan’s system played a critical role in Governor Glenn Youngkin’s Executive Order 19, which mandated a 25% reduction in the state’s regulatory code. That target has now doubled — with AI-enabled insights guiding what officials believe could be a 50% reduction.
“In just two months, Virginia mandated Vulcan’s platform across state agencies. No other reg-tech has done that,” said Philip Carson, Partner at Cubit Capital. “They’re not just making compliance easier — they’re replacing multimillion-dollar consulting contracts with real-time, auditable, AI-enabled rulemaking.”
Vulcan’s advisory board includes heavyweight legal minds like Patrick McLaughlin, regulatory economist at the Hoover Institution, and Jonathan Wolfson, former head of policy at the U.S. Department of Labor and White House economic adviser.
Editorial Insight: AI Enters the Rulebook
The U.S. regulatory system spans over 185,000 pages of federal code and more than 1 million individual rules and sub-rules across federal and state jurisdictions. According to the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the annual cost of federal regulation alone exceeds $1.9 trillion. Despite these enormous costs, most public sector agencies still rely on static PDFs, legacy databases, and expensive legal consultants to interpret compliance requirements.
This is the gaping hole Vulcan Technologies is stepping into — not as a legal firm, but as an AI infrastructure company for governance.
Its entry comes amid a larger wave of reg-tech funding, which globally hit $18.5 billion in 2024, according to Grand View Research. Yet, most of these companies focus on financial compliance or risk mitigation — not the broader legal architecture of governance itself. Vulcan, by contrast, is targeting the system rather than its outputs.
If it succeeds in doing for regulation what Palantir did for defense analytics, it won’t just cut compliance costs — it could help reset how laws are written, tracked, and reformed. There’s a reason investors from Dropbox’s founders to Y Combinator have taken notice: this isn’t just reg-tech. It’s governance-tech.
By The Times Mag Editorial Desk
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