When Openai met the ChatGpt moment in 2022, Joe Scheidler, co-founder and CEO of Helios, was working on a different kind of challenge. It helps build the White House’s newly licensed cybersecurity office and navigates the complexities of public-private coordination regarding cyber policies.
His current co-founder, Joseph Falsaf, is also at the State Department, working on the Yemen Hooty peace negotiations. The two began trading notes on how large-scale language models translate public policy at a daily level.
At the level operated by the White House, important decisions are often made using patchwork of tools, spreadsheets, and institutional memory. The founders saw a better way to support decision-making. Is this combined with an understanding of AI native tools and how public policy is determined?
The answer to that question was the idea behind Helios. To make that a reality, the co-founders brought in Shaydler, who worked for Microsoft and Data Dog, and machine learning veteran Brandon Smith, to lead the technical vision.
“Our unfair advantage is that it brings a very unique blend of domain expertise, contacts and technical expertise to a very important issue,” Scheidler told TechCrunch.
Helios (not to be confused with payroll/HR management solutions, or climate/economic forecasting products of the same name) emerged from stealth last month with $4 million in seed funding. The round was led by a rare venture with participation from Founders Inc. and Alumni Ventures. TechCrunch is an exclusive learning experience.
Helios’ flagship product Proxi, an AI-based operating system built for public policy, regulatory issues, law, compliance and government teams, is still in beta. But Scheidler said the company already sees early traction with workers from federal, state and local agencies, as well as workers from Fortune 500 companies and start-ups.
“We wanted to empower every public policy, legal and compliance expert with end-to-end automation. We deployed a web of trained, fine-tuned, secure AI agents on a highly robust public policy dataset to support them, from strategic advice to highly sensitive and complex writing products, data analytics, and stakeholder mapping.
Proxi has four core functions. The first is called “consultation,” and Scheidler describes it as “a conversational AI agent, a member of the 24/7 public policy team, constantly scanning the legislative and regulatory environment.”
Before they begin, customers tell Proxi about themselves, their jobs, portfolios, focuses and goals. The agent displays key information to the user each time he logs on.
In a sense, consultations are similar to another software platform, helping organizations use AI to monitor geopolitical and business risks.
The second feature of Proxi is called “Scribe”. This is a collaborative AI editing and writing tool that helps you to consult with memos, filing, and policy documents to turn your soundboard sessions into policy experts. Next is Decipher, a large-scale data analysis tool that helps users analyze long-term invoices, reports and filings and turn them into structured insights and risk alerts.
“That’s a lot of the time I spent at the State Department. When I was much more interested in being on the hill, I actually built relationships with people who were drafting and implementing regulations,” Scheidler said.
Finally, Proxi offers CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tools that help people visually map stakeholder environments and track interaction history, such as filling notes.
Scheidler said Helios uses top encryption standards for federal clients and is currently working through compliance audits.
Helios will use seed funds to materialize the product and engineering team, focusing on finding the right technician talent.
Rather than rushing to monetize, Scheidler says startups are focusing on building long-term business relationships and gathering meticulous feedback from early beta users. “Our goal five to seven years from now is that Helios is completely synonymous with all government public and private interactions,” he added.
That could mean past short-term competition like the Bloomberg government and the Financial Notes Forum challenges long-term rivals such as Palantil, Opengoff and Sibika, the co-founder said.
“Palantir just surpassed its $300 billion market capitalization,” Scheidler said. “I think there’s a lot of room to play in this space over time.”
Source link
