Helios, a public-sector AI startup redefining how institutions interact with law, regulation, and governance, has raised $4 million in seed funding. The round was led by Unusual Ventures, with participation from Founders Inc., Alumni Ventures, and a roster of strategic angels. With this funding, the company is scaling Proxi, its AI-native operating system for public policy professionals.

Helios was founded by Joe Scheidler and Joseph Farsakh, whose careers span roles at the White House, U.S. State Department, and global diplomatic initiatives. With Brandon Smith, former AI infrastructure lead at Microsoft and Datadog, they’ve built a product that goes far beyond document drafting or knowledge search - Proxi is designed to think and act alongside policy professionals navigating high-stakes institutional environments.

Proxi: An Agentic Operating System for Governance and Compliance

Proxi is a fully integrated AI platform for professionals working at the intersection of law, policy, regulation, and compliance. It includes a real-time legislative monitor (Consult), regulatory interpreter (Decipher), document drafter (Scribe), and a stakeholder-mapping CRM - all purpose-built to manage fluid, high-pressure workflows across government and enterprise contexts.

Rather than being a collection of AI tools, Proxi behaves like an operating system - interconnected, auditable, and constantly learning from the institutional memory it absorbs. Early users include policy teams inside Fortune 500s, multi-agency working groups, and regulatory compliance units who report that Proxi cuts decision latency and improves narrative clarity across teams.

In building Proxi, Helios made a pivotal decision: they didn’t design the product to “wow” individual users - they designed it to become invisible inside the organization. Its value compounds not because it looks like a breakthrough, but because it quietly transforms how work gets done. This is a signal lesson for startup founders: the most valuable AI products don’t seek attention - they eliminate complexity so thoroughly that they feel inevitable.

And that changes everything about go-to-market. Instead of pushing demos or running outbound campaigns, Helios focused on embedding with a small number of high-trust users and letting the system prove its worth. What they found is that when your product removes pain from a process people have silently endured for years, the adoption curve isn’t slow - it’s magnetic. Founders should take note: the market doesn’t always respond to novelty, but it never forgets relief. If your AI replaces noise with clarity and reactivity with control, distribution becomes less about selling - and more about letting the right people feel the absence of friction.

Infrastructure for Institutional Strategy

Helios isn’t chasing the typical enterprise AI hype cycle. From the start, the company built its agents with security, compliance, and interpretability in mind. Every interaction is logged and attributable, every recommendation traceable to source law, and every output structured for audit-readiness. This isn’t chat-for-compliance - it’s infrastructure for institutional governance.

The product’s architecture supports multi-stakeholder decision environments, where coordination and versioning matter just as much as speed. Users can map regulatory movements, create scenario trees, co-draft responses to agency rules, and manage internal sign-offs with intelligent agents guiding each step.

A Team Built for Policy Depth and Technical Rigor

Joe Scheidler brings firsthand experience in federal policy, having served in senior cybersecurity planning roles at the White House. Joseph Farsakh complements that with diplomatic and intergovernmental credentials from the State Department. Together, they bring lived experience in navigating opaque bureaucracies and high-consequence governance - experience that’s directly reflected in Proxi’s product DNA.

On the technical front, Brandon Smith’s leadership ensures Helios doesn’t compromise on performance or scalability. The team has deliberately hired engineers and designers fluent in institutional workflows - rare, but necessary for building software that fits without friction.

What’s Next for Helios

With this $4 million round, Helios will grow its engineering and product teams, build out deeper integrations with federal and state agency systems, and expand its support for compliance teams in healthcare, energy, and financial services. The company also plans to invest in interpretability research, ensuring that Proxi remains a trusted decision partner, not a black-box system.

Early traction has come from inbound interest - policy leaders who recognize the limits of spreadsheets, static trackers, and document overload. These users aren’t seeking automation for automation’s sake. They want clarity, control, and the ability to act before a policy shift becomes a problem. Helios delivers that by making their platform not just a tool, but an extension of how decisions are made.

Toward a New Standard of Public Sector Intelligence

The team at Helios believes we’re entering an era where policy teams need the same tooling advantages enjoyed by product and engineering orgs. The complexity of law, regulation, and stakeholder engagement is rising - and yet the software stack supporting these workflows remains fractured or nonexistent. Proxi aims to close that gap.

More than just streamlining tasks, the platform redefines institutional agility. In a world where governments move faster than ever - and risks emerge overnight - organizations need software that helps them see around corners and act with confidence. That’s what Helios is building: not just faster policy work, but smarter, more adaptive institutions.