State Affairs raises $70M from Founders Fund and Coastline to build a Bloomberg for state and federal policy intelligence

State Affairs raises $70M to build real-time policy intelligence for Fortune 100 companies

State Affairs has raised $70 million, primarily from Founders Fund and Coastline, to expand its platform tracking real-time legislative and regulatory developments across US federal and state governments. The company now has 187 employees, split roughly half editorial and half technology and sales.

The problem

Government affairs has long been a slow, fragmented function. Large enterprises typically rely on lobbyists or legacy data platforms that deliver PDF summaries weeks after key developments. With 50 states running 50 different legislative processes, companies routinely find out about threats to their business models too late to respond. Evan Burns describes a publicly traded CEO whose company's business model was effectively banned in a top-15 state — he learned about it only when the bill reached the governor's desk, forcing a last-minute scramble that could have been avoided entirely with earlier visibility.

“The problem that we're focused on every day is policy and regulatory markets affect so much of what companies do, but everybody just acts like they're a thing that have to happen to us. We said, let's try to build something around that — kinda like Bloomberg, instead of focusing on financial markets, we're just focused on building a knowledge graph around the day to day movement, federally in all states and eventually cities, around these policies that change regulations. We have brands like Mastercard and McDonald's and Walmart that are already subscribers.”

What State Affairs actually does

Burns describes the product as a Bloomberg for policy intelligence. The platform ingests hearings, bills, amendments, votes, committee changes, fiscal notes, and executive orders across every state and federally, then maps relationships between those datasets using AI to surface momentum and downstream effects. Journalists embedded in state capitals feed ground-level intelligence that never makes it onto government websites — in some states, Burns notes, amendments exist only on paper in a state office, and the only way to get a recording of a senate floor hearing in North Carolina is to visit a congressional library, pay $1.25, and get it burned onto a CD-ROM.

The data infrastructure challenge is significant. Only two state government websites have APIs. Syntax varies sharply across states. Jamie Seltzer says the team models bill momentum across roughly 150 unique daily data points, stopping short of calling it predictive but describing it as tracking the likelihood that a policy gains traction in a given state.

Customers and commercial traction

Customers include Mastercard, McDonald's, and Walmart. The pitch to Fortune 100 government affairs teams is moving from reactive to proactive — understanding where a policy discussion is heading months before a bill is introduced, rather than pulling strings at the governor's desk.

Expansion roadmap

City-level coverage is the next domestic step. International demand is already coming from existing enterprise customers, and Burns names Canada, Australia, and the UK as likely targets. The longer-term ambition is to cover all western democracies with the same daily knowledge graph the platform builds for the US.

With 187 people on staff and Founders Fund backing, State Affairs is moving from a niche policy data service toward a defensible enterprise platform — one where the moat is less the AI and more the on-the-ground editorial network that feeds it.