When Joe Scheidler was helping to launch the White House’s cybersecurity office in 2022, he faced a reality common to many in government: decisions often relied on a jumble of spreadsheets, legacy systems, and institutional memory. Meanwhile, his future co-founder Joseph Farsakh was at the State Department working on sensitive peace negotiations in Yemen. The two found themselves frequently discussing how the emerging power of large language models might reshape public policy work itself.
From those conversations, the idea for Helios was born—a startup committed to building an AI-powered operating system for public policy, regulatory, legal, and compliance professionals. To bring the vision to life, Scheidler and Farsakh partnered with Brandon Smith, a seasoned machine learning expert with experience at Microsoft and Datadog, to lead the technical side.
“We’re combining deep subject matter expertise, a strong network, and advanced technical skills to tackle a critical problem,” Scheidler explained.
Helios stepped out of stealth mode last month, securing $4 million in seed funding. The round was led by Unusual Ventures, with backing from Founders Inc. and Alumni Ventures. The company’s flagship platform, Proxi, is currently in beta and already drawing interest from federal agencies, state and local governments, major corporations, and emerging startups.
Proxi is designed as an all-in-one workspace. The first of its four core features is “Consult,” a conversational AI agent that monitors policy and regulatory changes around the clock. Users begin by defining their focus areas, goals, and work scope, and Consult automatically curates the most relevant updates each time they log in.
Next comes “Scribe,” a collaborative AI writing assistant that helps transform conversations into polished memos, policy papers, and regulatory filings. The third component, “Decipher,” is a data analysis engine that can digest lengthy reports, legislative text, or filings and turn them into structured summaries and risk assessments. Finally, Proxi includes a CRM tool that helps professionals map relationships, track interactions, and record notes from stakeholder meetings.
Scheidler emphasized that strong security is essential, especially for government clients. Helios has implemented high-level encryption and is undergoing compliance reviews to meet federal standards.
Rather than prioritizing immediate revenue, the team is concentrating on refining the product and collecting thoughtful feedback from early adopters. Scheidler believes that over time, Helios can become the go-to platform for public policy work, rivaling giants like Palantir and OpenGov.
“We see an enormous opportunity,” Scheidler said. “In a few years, we want Helios to be the backbone of how governments and organizations engage on policy.”
