SKUMU · OUT OF STEALTH — JULY 2026
It runs the government's own rules against your live deal and tells you if it can win, what's blocking the deal and who needs to fix it. We're live today on real deals.
On a $47.6 million Los Angeles housing deal, Skumu came within 4 points of the state's own final score — before the state published it.
Everyone building AI right now picks one of two lanes. One organizes the documents you already have. The other holds data you can get but can't easily use.
Skumu built the third way: an operating system that runs the rules and regulations and returns the answer that was never in your paperwork and wasn't a search away.
THE MARKET
Every year, more than a trillion dollars moves through public programs — tax credits, grants, infrastructure and housing funding — and none of it moves because somebody asked nicely. A project has to prove that it qualifies, then keep proving it until the last dollar is spent. Right now that proof is divided among a lawyer's memo, a consultant's spreadsheet and an inbox somebody meant to check. Skumu brings the record into one AI platform for every partner and firm responsible for moving that deal along.
Skumu reads the arcane rules, regulations and compliance attached to the money, checks the deal against them and tells each team what belongs to them: what is done, what is missing, what's blocking and what can still keep the project from getting to yes.
WHY SKUMU EXISTS
We were building Skumu in Los Angeles, where public money, private ambition and political reality all meet on the same Palm-lined block. We had excellent attorneys, consultants, grant writers and public-affairs teams.
We still learned what could kill a deal after the money was already spent, because every firm owned its part and the whole decision tree lived nowhere.
The rules were public. The agency's scores were public. The history was public. Reading all of it took time from working the actual deal.
So we built the system we needed: years of agency rulebooks modeled rule by rule, tens of thousands of pages of source documents parsed against the records. Skumu works the deal for the whole process.
A chatbot reads the rules and gives you a confident guess. Skumu executes them — the same way an agency will — and traces every answer to its source. Underneath sits the part no AI model can ship: a deterministic engine that runs each program's scoring and a corpus of who won, who lost and why. Swap one AI model for the next one and Skumu still works, because the AI model was never the machine.
HOW WE DID IT
We gave Skumu one file — a $47.6 million Los Angeles affordable housing application — and the rulebooks the city and the state would judge by. Not the result.
Skumu called it: no-go, not this cycle. Three threshold items, out of thousands of rules, were blocking it cold. Skumu named all three and routed each to the person who owned it.
This is the part a filing tool can't do. Each blocker went to the firm responsible for it — developer, counsel, public-affairs — all working from one record, on one platform instead of three inboxes. The deal didn't get neater, we made it clearable for all of the parties.
It cleared. Skumu came within 4 points of the state's final score — and it got there before the state published. That is the point: the machine calls the outcome early and close enough to save the pursuit spend, before the next dollar is committed. The project got its reservation — CA-24-044.
Same deal, start to finish. A thin layer built on an AI model can't reproduce our arc. Skumu can, because we ran the rules. The paperwork was always public. The answer never was — until we built the machine that computes it.
Sherman Way · $47.6M · 31 requirements · 9 evidence items
Day one: NO GO — not this cycle
Three threshold items blocking it cold — each routed to the firm that owns it.
Developer CTCAC 9% allocation letter — outstanding
−4.650 points to the agency review
Counsel Closing conditions — 0 of 9 on file
9 to track · 0 of 9 on file
Public affairs Letter of Support · Council District 3
Securing on the record
This deal's state is on the record · CA-24-044 · every entry traces to source
THE PLATFORM
We chose California affordable housing as our first large scale market test because California is one of the hardest versions of the problem: dense regulation, competitive scoring, expensive specialists, political judgment and deadlines that don't care how many people were copied on an email. If Skumu can make the decision legible here, the platform can travel wherever rules, evidence and capital collide.
A new market vertical is a new body of rules and outcomes built on the Skumu platform, and we're already running betas for EV infrastructure against California Energy Commission programs.
That's how Skumu solves the cold start and moves from housing into education funding, infrastructure earmarks, healthcare reimbursement, HR and medical programs over time.
WHY THIS COMPOUNDS
The rules governing public money do not sit still. In 2026, California's AB 179 and the federal ROAD to Housing Act each rewrote parts of the housing landscape across hundreds of pages. Skumu mapped what each one touched within days — which citations changed, which provisions move the money and which are authorizations waiting on a budget. Public capital already published decades of who won and who lost. Every round that closes on our platform makes our next answer sharper.
THE RECORD
The go decision is never made alone. Developer, legal counsel and public-affairs partner each have live surfaces reading the same records — legal sees obligations and risk, PAP sees stakeholders and outreach, the developer sees the verdict and what to fix. Permission-gated for real: no one sees a control they can't use, proven with real logged-in sessions — and each carries the chained and hashed liability if something is missed.
The Skumu product is where the decision layer becomes a shared record: what was reviewed, what was found and who owns what remains. That record is each professional's proof they did their job and worked toward the goal of winning the capital — and a true accountability trail.
Multiple paid seats per deal instead of one. And every attorney and public-affairs firm that runs one matter through the layer carries it into the next client's deal. That is how it crosses the market: professional to professional, portfolio to portfolio.
Sherman Way · $47.6M · 31 requirements · 9 evidence items
The operator sees readiness and the cost of continuing.
Self-score final 73.468%
Applicant §10325(c)(9) · reproduced by Skumu
Agency-review delta −4.650 points
CTCAC staff report CA-24-044, p.4
Next move Upload the CTCAC 9% allocation letter
Outstanding in our records · finance
This seat's work is on the record · CA-24-044 · every entry traces to source
THE COMPANY
We come from the operator's side of the table — the side responsible for the money after everyone else has gone home.
Meet the company