The cold start isn’t just an engineering problem. It’s what every startup walks into when they’re bold enough to relocate from Brooklyn to Biddeford, Maine, right in the dead of January, and still convince DOD brass and Space Force insiders that this is the team to bet on. That’s the thing about ConductorAI: They don’t just scale software. They scale trust in the most skeptical rooms in government. And now, they’ve got $15 million in fresh Series A fuel to prove it.
Led by Lux Capital and backed by the kind of crew that doesn’t waste time on pipe dreams, Altman Capital, Haystack Ventures, Sunflower Capital, Humba Ventures, Also Capital, Forward Deployed VC, and Abstract Ventures, this raise isn’t about hype. It’s about capacity. ConductorAI is building the infrastructure for compliance in an AI-first era. Because in defense, finance, and healthcare, your bottlenecks aren’t technical; they’re bureaucratic. And the old way of doing policy? That’s the real national security risk.
The founders? Zachary Long and Eric Schwartz spent 7 years in the Palantir trenches, elbows deep in defense and DOJ missions. That’s not resume fluff; that’s institutional memory encoded into product. Ben Fichter (CTO) swapped startup noise for Maine calm, pushing to hire elite engineering talent where most VCs wouldn’t think to look. It’s not contrarian if it works; it’s just smart.
Their product, Conduit, doesn’t just “ingest documents.” It atomizes policy into structured workflows that actually move. Think LLMtransparency, complianceautomation, and declassificationpipelines, all running at multiple classificationlevels across cloudnative and onprem deployments. The government calls it transformation. Engineers call it a miracle. ConductorAI just calls it Tuesday.
The impact? DOD teams report a 50% cut in policy review time. Meanwhile, the federal government is torching $38.7 billion a year in outdated manual processes, and up to 90% of classified material is improperly labeled. That’s not inefficiency; it’s an existential liability. ConductorAI didn’t just read the playbook. They scanned it, flagged the inconsistencies, routed it through Conduit, and got it approved before lunch.
This $15M isn’t the destination; it’s the launch sequence. The roadmap? Grow the team (15 and climbing), go deeper into DoD, and take on commercial giants weighed down by red tape and regulatory landmines. With a $7B budget earmarked for federal AI adoption in FY25 and ITAR compliance still stuck in the fax era, ConductorAI is building the rails for something bigger than software. They’re making bureaucracy move at the speed of thought.
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