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

exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. I think Chai Discovery might be there any day now and you're putting up multi-billion dollar rounds. Anything's possible. Our next guests are Evan Burns, the CEO and co-founder of State Affairs and Jamie Seltzer, the co-founder of State Affairs. Very excited to be joined by both of them. How are you guys doing? We haven't seen each other in uh what a year and a half. Hereticon, I think that was the last time we hung out. How you doing?

Welcome to the show. quick introduction yourself and

so great to see you guys

but good to see you guys

happy to be here guys Jimmy you want to go first

I got it

yeah I'm one of the founders of state affairs I'm also a GP at light shed ventures I fashion myself as a poor man delions or a poor man Josh Kushner uh doing kind of both but uh yeah founded state affairs with Evan four years ago

very cool

and you're an absolute dog a very a very humble on at that and uh a dear friend. So, it's great to see you here at long last. Evan, over to you.

Hard to follow that. Uh entrepreneur most recently build and sold finish long drink. I should have come on here when we when we had that exit a couple months ago.

The boys were so ready to crack them open in the in the studio today.

They were they were they wanted us I wanted you guys to join and we go

Yeah. They were like this is huge. Anyway, sorry. State affairs.

Yeah. And so also the co-founder and C State affairs.

Yeah. And uh just set the table on like the shape of state affairs business, why it's unique, how like the footprint, the strategy because it's fascinating. I think uh under discussed.

Yeah. Jamie, why don't you tell me about how you didn't even mention or tell me to invest until about a couple years had passed and you guys were at tens of millions of uh of revenue. No, I'm just kidding. Evan, go for it. I think Jimmy was worried about that when we were coming on here. Was like, I don't know, we might be uh might be asking for this. Um, we had to do something different than everybody else doing finance. So, of course, we picked this. But, um,

but the the problem that we saw and that what we're focused on every day is,

and it's probably true for most of your guests,

these 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're all reactive to them. So Jimmy and I had this idea like what if we could build a platform kind of like Bloomberg. Instead of focusing our financial markets, we're just focused on building a knowledge graph around the day-to-day movement federally and all states and eventually cities around these policies that change around regulations. And in the day, we think they affect most businesses more than what the financial markets do. But if you're a leader of a business, how do you pay attention to them? How do you hear what the discussions are about SNAP benefits access or about AI data center building or about public safety uh tracking? are we going to have tracking or not? Like these things are massive and I think most people in America have just decided, oh, they are these things are what they are. So we said, let's try to build something around that.

And so h how much does this look like a media business? How much does this look like newsrooms across the country, rollups? Are you hiring people? Are are you acquiring whole businesses? Walk through how you actually get a broad footprint out there to track all those topics you mentioned. Yeah, I think I think what we didn't realize getting into this was if you look at the legislative process of making policy, there's so many pieces to it and so much data to it. So you have all the hearings of that happen in every state. You have all the bills that are introduced and every bill if it even makes it is going to have hundreds if not thousands of data points that change along the way, whether it's the wording or the votes or the committees or the sponsors. And of course we have we we did actually build out journalists a team of journalism and it's very important that they're nonpartisan going and doing coverage what's happening in the state houses also asking questions around these policy and regulations. So it's that whole mix together that becomes this knowledge graph that enables the users to plug in and say okay what's happening today with SNAP access benefits what's going to happen next next year around GLP1 access with Medicaid like these things are changing kind of by the day but you might not see it in a law for another six months a year two years even

and so for the for the the the the pre-ai the last few years the experience of the customer was a subscription and then sort of like a entire hose of facts that were not previously reported about things that are happening in areas that they care about or all over the nation. Um, how is that changing in the AI era? What are customers asking for and then what are you building?

Well, the the first thing that we're able to do is map the relationships of all of these different data sets using AI. And so sometimes something will happen in one state and it can affect, you know, states that are tangentially down. And so without basically having built out, you know, through journalism, we have on the ground people that input data that sometimes doesn't make it to the government websites, budgets, bills, hearings, fiscal notes, executive orders. We're mapping the relationships of all these things through our models and we're finding net new insights for our customers.

Yeah. Talk about how legislation and and ideas flow between different different, you know, state and local governments. We were covering, you know, New York's data center ban or moratorum earlier today. We were talking also about how uh Paramount and the Ellison's are up against a number of different AGs. And so it just feels like you guys could get to a point where you can almost forecast the way that policy is kind of shifting and moving around the country.

We we do do that to a certain extent right now. I don't say we do predictive but we do model the momentum of how bills are likely to get picked up or the the likelihood of a certain policy um picking up more and more steam in a particular state. So you know we we basically have our models have 150 kind of unique data points that we source from on a daily basis that are kind of constantly resetting the momentum on these

historically big companies let's say fortune 500s like how many how many how many individual what what would the teams look like you know the the government affairs teams look like to try to get the level of coverage that you guys are now offering I imagine they're buying data working with maybe more local companies. But but uh the the pitch now is like, you know, one platform access to intelligence across tons of different, you know, counties and states and and things like that. But how how are you pitching it? I think the main thing you have to when we talk to all these folks and we've sat down with a ton of Fortune 100 brands and have you know brands like Mastercard and McDonald's and Walmart that are already subscribers but like the problem of what everybody is facing before is they've got like lobbyists or like old school data platforms that are often like much slower than real-time information. So you're waiting for a firm to send you a PDF deck from like something that happened two weeks ago and you've got 50 different states. So it's very different formats and so the ability to plug in and understand real-time movement on what's happening with discussion around you know data center or licensing or power buildouts uh it's very tough and it's late. So we want to switch people from being kind of late to the game to understand what's even happening to proactively involving themselves in the democratic process and ideally trying to get their voice heard involved before before the bills are even introduced let alone waiting for them to get all the way to the governor's desk which happens a lot. We're talking to the CEO of a of a publicly traded company that I think the uh I think the CEO has been on here. I won't say his name, but you know their company business model was basically banned in a top 15 state. Got to this got to the governor's desk and this you didn't even know about it until got to the governor's desk until their business model would have been banned and then they had to pull all this very painful very painful um strings and favors to kind of get it fixed at the very last second. But if they had just been involved a year before, they'd have seen it coming.

How what does your guys' team look like? I imagine it's extremely distributed.

Well, we have about 187 employees. It's about half editorial, half tech and sales. Um, the editorial newsrooms are on the ground in each state. So, yes, they are distributed. Like, we do believe that being in the room is the difference maker on a lot of this intelligence from a from an editorial side. And then engineering, we're in DC, San Francisco, and Miami.

Are you seeing uh acceleration or value in sort of like vibe coding integrations to government websites to scrape and organize data?

Uh I think it's very difficult to do that.

It's the final that that'll be AGI. We need super intelligence to get filings into a database. However unsophisticated federal government websites are, state government websites are that much harder to navigate. I think like only two of them have APIs, okay, just to kind of level set on on where they're dealing with. And you know, a lot of this

the syntax on how they label their data is very different. And so there's like a huge cleaning process. In Ohio, for example, if a bill has an amendment to it, um sometimes it never goes onto the government website. you have to go into an office in the state, go and get it.

Um there's this example we love to give in North Carolina that if you don't um

watch a Senate floor committee hearing, uh you have the only way to go and get a recording of that is to go into the congressional library, pay a $1.25, get it burned onto a CDROM, and then you get custody of it. So like yeah, it's it's it's uh pretty antiquated.

Yeah. You have and you have information every day, right? So we we made the joke before that like we all think about the Roman Empire a lot of course but you only have to label the Roman Empire once like it's done it's over and like

got to get different the information and data around what's happening in government legislation every day

because what the process was last week has changed and whatever today at happenings today is the most important.

What do your customers want you to do next in terms of coverage? Is there demand for international coverage or even more local like you know like HOA or something? I don't know how deep you could go. Like how low how low level can you go and then how high

the mayor in this town of 5,000 people sneezes.

I want to know I want to know

for the right price we can definitely figure that out. You know

I don't know about HOAs though. I don't the sanity sanity quotient too much. But if you if you look at these major we have international customers um Fortune50 brands you name it. the thing that they're trying to figure out again is this real time movement on things that have billion dollar or tens of millions of dollars effect in their business. Yeah. So for sure like we do federal now we do state we'll get into city um there's a huge ask for international because if you've already got your executive team and government affairs leadership on us and you've got US why not Canada why not Australia why not UK so the goal certainly to do this this daily build this kind of daily knowledge graph and platform for sort of all western democracies but we're definitely just started here in the US

that's very exciting well you raised some more money tell us about the round how much did you raise

70 million bunch of nobodyies Hey,

who who participated?

How many How many times a day do you get to do that, by the way?

Uh, today's five or six. It's great.

Got to warm it up, too.

Sometimes we'll hit it twice. I I'll I'll hit it if you who participated in the round.

Participated.

Uh, it's been primarily Coastal and Founders Fun. A big shot.

Those guys, they needed a

Never heard of them. Never heard of them.

Never heard of them. Glad you guys are putting them on the map.

Yeah. Yeah. It's good. Thank you for what you're doing for them.

Uh so great to have you guys on and uh incredible progress. I'm I'm glad you're talking more about what you're doing because I've been getting the updates for for years now and um

yeah, I know you guys would only start talking about what you're doing once you were confident you were going to eat the entire market. So

great.