Welcome to FinTech TV.
Helios is building proxy, the first AI native operating system for public policy professionals that tracks laws, regulations, and public signals to flag what matters before it hits your bottom line.
It's like having a world-class policy expert embedded directly in your team built for Fortune 500 lobbyists and government teams, proxy maps, stakeholders.
Influence and generates advocacy material.
Helios just came out of stealth with $4 million in seed funding led by unusual ventures with participation from Founders Inc. and Alumni Ventures.
Joining me at the New York Stock Exchange with more is Joe Scheidler, the co-founder and CEO, and Brandon Smith, co-founder and CTO.
Gentlemen, thank you so much for joining.
It's our pleasure to be here.
Well, first and foremost, Joe, starting out with you, tell me about the organization.
Yeah, so Helios is an early stage startup company focused on building an AI native operating system for public policy professionals, and it really came out of the work that I did in government for years alongside my other co-founder Joseph Farsock and really just seeing firsthand how slow, fragmented, and disorganized public policymaking still is today.
So we thought, why not apply an AI Native solution to help public policy interaction move much faster and more efficiently.
So Joe, tell me what problem Helios is solving in the policy and government affairs.
Yeah, totally.
So I mean there are teams within the government and working with it in the private sector who are always focused on tracking policy signals that could have a positive or adverse impact on their organization or their clientele.
So what we're doing is really providing an always on 24/7 army of public policy professionals in the form of a native AI operating system. that has agentic capabilities to track policy developments that could have an impact.
So you don't have to be worrying about that.
Additionally, we're really enhancing the productivity capabilities of these teams within government and working with it to help them move faster on stakeholder mapping, writing policy documents, responding to regulatory comments, draft legislation, and many other actions that happen every single day in public policy.
And naturally that leads me to my next question.
How is it different from what's out there right now?
So for us, we've spent so much time identifying and aggregating hard truth data sets in the public policy landscape, so legislative and regulatory data sets, primarily within the United States, but a global footprint, and we have fine tuned our AI models against that data.
So Professionals in this space can trust but verify the outputs we're providing in our system.
Veracity and traceability is a really important component to building trust in the space.
And Brandon, I do want to move on to you.
You're the CTO, so tell us about Proxy and how the platform worked.
Yeah, I mean, it's like Joe was saying we've built a pretty incredible corpus of data set of legislative regulatory, and all sorts of documentation across all of the legislative bodies, and the key here is the, you know, hard truth data that we can, you know, provide real veracity out of our output.
So we built a proprietary.
A knowledge graph that you know kind of powers a lot of what we're doing here and especially being able to recommend or you know connect you to the, you know, information and relationships that you need to power.
So Joe, tell us whose do you think helios right now.
So great, we're currently in private beta and we have customer segmentation spanning the Fortune 500, the Russell 2000, primarily government affairs compliance, regulatory intelligence teams, as well as, you know, SMBs and government agencies across the federal and subnational levels, legislative offices who are conducting many of these.
Workflows and you know in many cases these are teams who are making multi-billion dollar decisions in private markets and we're helping them kind of ensure that they are tracking all relevant policy signals that could have any sort of impact on that decision calculus.
And I also do want to ask you, what are the biggest benefits that users have experienced to date.
Yeah, so really the key aspect is being able to have live real-time insight into what's happening in the world and especially what's happening with regulatory and legislative changes that can impact you and your business and you know, can crumble industries overnight.
So that's kind of what we're trying to help protect organizations against by enabling them access to this real-time information that's, you know, directly cited and, you know, directly verifiable.
Hallucinations are still a big problem across the board.
What's next for Helios and tell me about the long term vision.
So right now in the short term we're building a world class team coming up for our seat fundraise headquartered in New York and you know focused on becoming the tool of choice and in large respects already are for public policy professionals.
We've seen Haa do this for financial services and Harvey do it for law.
We are first to market with public policy professionals, giving them a truly end to end AI need a solution.
In the long term, 10 years from now, if not sooner, we hope to be on, you know, the opening bell behind us here going public, and this is a massive market.
Palant here has done a great job in providing.
Um, AI power data analysis tools to, you know, defense and intelligence, but there's still so much more market to play with.
Um, roughly 15% of US GDP is represented by government spending, and we think there's a real opportunity to provide so much more value for the end user, the American people, by making helio synonymous with all government public private interaction.
Well, Joe, Brandon, thank you so much for joining me here at the New York Stock Exchange and for sharing the story of Helio.
Thank you for having us.
