From Policy Clutter to Clarity: How One Startup Is Using AI To Track Changes In State Politics

Do you know what bills your state’s legislators passed last year? How about the ones for this year that will impact tax decisions, school districts, and budgets?

Even those that follow state-level politics for a living have trouble keeping up, given the sheer amount of information created. Every state has its own legislative process, calendar, and terminology, North Carolina-based entrepreneur Paul Rava told Hypepotamus. For example, Georgia’s legislative session goes from January to April each year. This year, 400 400 bills and resolutions cleared the Legislature. North Carolina runs from January until July. In Tennessee, which wrapped up its legislative session in April, saw over 60 bills introduced just on the state’s voting procedures.

The sheer scale is staggering, particularly for government affairs teams, lobbyists, nonprofits, corporations, law firms, and political reporters who need to stay ahead of legislative developments on a daily basis. Rava gave an example in the North Carolina legislature, there were over one million words of new legislation were introduced in a single day this year.

Rava and his co-founders saw this chaos and decided to build a new startup called Roboro. The Raleigh-based startup is designed to be a state-specific, AI-powered legislative intelligence platform. Positioning itself as an "operating system for legislation," Rava said the platform provides in-depth and specialized policy insights in real-time for an industry that's been historically underserved by technology.

"Our mission is to empower informed advocacy so folks can drive the change they want to see in the world,” Rava told Hypepotamus.

AI Insights Into Important Policy

Traditionally, keeping up with important legislation has meant cobbling together solutions with makeshift Excel spreadsheets, outdated keyword tools, or just institutional knowledge and memory. Lobbyists, who are most likely managing multiple clients across different jurisdictions and subject matters, have had to rely primarily on keyword searches, which often miss the nuances of the policy world.

Roboro's approach is different. Instead of forcing users to think in keywords, the platform's onboarding process focuses on inputs in plain English. The platform’s AI then suggests relevant bills, provides necessary summaries, and offers contextual impact analysis.

The goal is to be “the eyes and ears at the legislation” for those who are following individual bills, said Rava.

The platform also provides real-time alerts, predictive analysis, and contextual insights for specific bills and conversations that are going through a state house.

Roboro’s outputs can give users information “often hours before their peers,” Rava added.

The startup is currently available in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia, and is rolling out new jurisdictions monthly based on geographic demand. It operates in a SaaS model with both monthly and annual subscription plans.

The Human-AI Balance in Advocacy

The platform doesn't replace the fundamentally human work required to do lobbying and advocacy work, Rava added.

"Lobbying and advocacy are very uniquely human [activities] and something that AI could never replace," he told Hypepotamus. "But what we believe is the best advocacy happens with the right combination of human and AI. Let machines do what machines do well: scale, precision, speed. [And combine] that with the uniquely human elements of building relationships and leveraging trust."

Alongside Rava, who previously served as a Senior Auditor at KPMG, the co-founding team includes Jenny Bo (enterprise sales background) and James Gieszelmann (a software engineer who previously worked at Q2 and PrecisionLender).

While Rava didn't disclose specific funding details or investors, he noted that Roboro has "secured capital from a strong but limited group of early supporters — a group that understands the complexity of legislation and also the potential for AI to transform it."

--Featured image created by an AI image generator specifically for this article