The global regulatory compliance market is $63 billion and projected to grow to $135 billion by 2030, with the potential to eclipse even the massive legal AI opportunity. Vulcan Technologies, just five months old and recently graduated from the summer ‘25 Y Combinator batch, is attacking this enormous regulatory market with AI that serves both government and enterprise. That's why we're leading their $10.9M seed round.

Mapping the Law with AI

Vulcan is developing America’s regulatory operating system. Their agentic platform ingests every law, regulation, and court case across every jurisdiction —  federal, state, and municipal. Their “intelligent legal cartography” parses every clause, maps authority chains, flags conflicts and contradictions, drafts compliance plans, answers legal questions, and curates new statutory and regulatory text with audit-ready citations. Vulcan aims to create a living map of American law to help industry build and grow and help governments at all levels deliver democracy faster and at a lower cost.

Their platform is already delivering value to several government entities. Vulcan implemented AI across all agencies in the State of Virginia at 10 percent of the cost quoted by legacy consultancies, resulting in Governor Glenn Youngkin requiring all Virginia agencies to use technology Vulcan invented. They’ve also identified regulatory streamlining opportunities for advocacy groups in South Carolina and worked with the Department of Education to process thousands of public comments through rule-based agent workflows.

The Vulcan team combines policy expertise with technical depth. CEO Tanner Jones declined Harvard Law School to start Vulcan after exiting another GovTech company. Prior to this, he worked on a Democratic presidential campaign and served as the Technology and Regulatory Policy Director at the Cicero Institute, where he worked in thirty states. Aleksander Mekhanik, a Dartmouth ML engineer, national chess champion, and math prodigy, built the graph and agent architecture at the platform’s core. Chris Minge is a Princeton CS grad who brings scaling experience from Google CoreML, where he built infrastructure powering Gemini and Waymo. Their partnership is built on long-standing trust: Tanner has known Chris since middle school and won powerlifting championships with Aleksander at Dartmouth.

Our Conversation with Tanner

We sat down with Tanner to talk about his vision for legal cartography. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You call Vulcan “legal cartography.” Why frame the law as terrain, and what does it mean to navigate it with software instead of lawyers?

As America approaches its semiquincentennial, we should be conscious that our nation's law has evolved from a few thousand pages of founding documents into an impenetrable wilderness of over 260 million lines of federal law, more than a million federal regulatory restrictions, countless court decisions, and an additional stratum of fifty state statutory and regulatory regimes — terra incognita where even expert lawyers don't know what they don't know, and where innovative businesses die not from bad ideas but from invisible regulatory walls. This incoherent legal morass blocks American abundance.

Legal cartography solves this problem and means creating the first intelligent map of the American legal terrain: traditional legal practice is like navigating with a compass and word-of-mouth directions, but Vulcan builds the GPS, showing every possible route, which paths are blocked, and what new passages recent changes have opened.

Consulting firms and law firms flood companies and government agencies with people, but you’re betting that a small team with a knowledge graph can outmaneuver them. What makes your product the better alternative?

American law is not only vast and arduous, but constantly changing: the earth is shifting beneath our feet. Every day brings new court decisions, regulatory changes, guidance issuances, and statutory amendments across federal and state jurisdictions, changes that cascade through interconnected legal frameworks that human teams cannot possibly track in real time. Vulcan’s AI platform does not face the human constraints that lawyers and consultancies inevitably endure: our product cannot be captured by perverse incentives, does not depend on headcount, does not fatigue after 18-hour days, updates continuously as new regulations are published, and maintains a panoptic view of the entire regulatory landscape rather than siloed expertise. Our tools are singularly focused on empowering innovators and reformers, unlocking accountability and abundance.

Accuracy and explainability are non-negotiable in law. How do you design a system where a single mis-labeled clause could become a lawsuit?

Our system tracks and displays each AI decision as a traceable chain of legal citations linking back to specific statutes, regulations, and case law that thousands of agents analyze concurrently. We maintain human-in-the-loop verification at critical junctures, treating our technology as sophisticated legal research rather than autonomous decision-making. Our tools train exclusively on verified legal corpora and generate confidence scores for each interpretation, flagging ambiguous areas for human review rather than making definitive calls on contested questions. Most importantly, the entire chain of thought is fully transparent and iterative for every user.

More than just efficiency, you say that AI has the potential to either make firms and public services more effective or accelerate bureaucratic bloat. How do you see Vulcan tipping that balance?

Vulcan ensures both compliance teams and regulators actually achieve their intended goals. For industry, that’s identifying the path to build and grow. For government, that’s exercising and implementing the underlying law and the will of the people. In Virginia, we strengthened several neglected safety protections while eliminating 40% of redundant requirements, contributing to reforms that reduced the price of a new home by $24,000 on average in the state. By automating mechanical regulatory analysis, we free lawyers to do what AI cannot: make nuanced policy judgments about competing interests. With Vulcan, government can pursue intentional governance for growth and abundance. From this position, our pitch to industry is simple: you can trust us to help you navigate regulations because government already trusts us to help them write regulations.