Skumu is the operating system for public capital.
Skumu is an AI company, built by operators, for the regulatory and compliance side of public capital. Our cloud-based platform scores your application the way the government agency's formula will, names what's blocking the application and keeps every partner — developer, lawyer, consultant, public affairs and the bank — working from the same data on one platform.
More than a trillion dollars a year goes out through public programs.
That money goes out as tax credits, grants, infrastructure and housing funding and a project has to prove that it qualifies, then keep proving it until the last dollar is spent.
Proving that has two names: regulatory and compliance. Every program comes with regulations you have to meet to win the money and compliance you have to keep to hold on to it — prevailing wage, eligible costs, relocation plans, the reporting that runs for years after the award. Fall out of compliance and that money can be clawed back.
An attorney flags a requirement in a memo nobody acts on, a consultant assumes Legal has it covered and the project loses, because each piece of the work stayed with the person who found it. At Skumu, we built the system to prevent those types of failures.
We built it because we needed it.
Skumu was built in Los Angeles, where public money, private ambition and political reality all meet on the same palm tree-lined block. We spent decades founding and operating companies that depended on grants, incentives, public programs and regulatory and compliance approvals. We hired excellent attorneys, consultants, grant writers and public-affairs teams. Talent was never the problem. The problem was we couldn’t see the whole decision process in one place — each partner and firm held part of the answer while we remained responsible for orchestrating the whole deal.
The first version of Skumu was a simple tracker built around a $4 million California Energy Commission project. The work was massive and so were the partner collaborations. We needed to know whether the project was ready and whether it could win before we committed more money.
We don't read the rules. We run them.
Every public program is thousands of pages of scoring rules, eligibility tests, all based on the specific regulatory and compliance needs of that public funding program. At Skumu, we turn those pages into hundreds of deterministic checks and run every one against your live deal — the moment we load it and again every time anything changes. We score your deal the same way the agency would and trace every answer back to its source. Then we tell you what's blocking the deal: what checks will kill the application and what and how you still have time to fix it. We then hand each application blocker to the person who owns it - the developer, the lawyer, the consultant, the financiers – so you can cleanly get the approvals you need.
A real deal, modeled to win.
We had to prove the platform somewhere first, so we pointed it at the regulatory and compliance heavy affordable housing programs in Los Angeles, one of the hardest scoring systems in public capital. We took a real Los Angeles deal with $47.6 million on the line, reserved by the state in 2024, before Skumu existed. We gave our engine the raw application and the rulebook without the result and rebuilt the applicant's own score, 73.468%, to within a thousandth of a point.
What it means: Skumu can model the outcome early and closely enough so you’ll know where your deal scores before you spend the next dollar. Our platform delivers a “Go or No Go” verdict, so developers can decide if they want to sink more time and money into a deal that is unlikely to win.
See the full decisionTHE THIRD LANE
Everyone building AI picks one of two lanes. We picked a third.
One lane is an AI that tidies up the documents you already have, and anyone can build that. The other holds data you can't get yourself, but it's a vault that's hard to use with your outside partners. We built the third — one platform for the whole job. An engine that runs the government's own rules, a corpus that knows who won and who lost and why and a harness that brings every partner on the deal into one system.
Every partner on the deal works in one simple platform.
One Platform. Multiple seats.
The go decision is never made alone. Every partner it takes to win a public capital deal works on the Skumu platform - consultants, legal counsel, public-affairs partners, lobbyists, operators, grants teams and banks — each reading the same records.
Legal sees obligations and risk, public affairs sees stakeholders and outreach, banks and financiers see the money and an operator sees the whole work process in action, what to fix and why.
Skumu is where the decision layer becomes an immutable shared record: what was reviewed, what was found and who owns what remains. That record is each professional's proof they did their job — a true accountability trail.
Affordable housing is our first market. It's not where Skumu ends.
We chose California affordable housing as our first test because it's one of the hardest versions of the problem: dense regulation, competitive scoring, expensive specialists, political judgment and tight deadlines.
If we can get this right in California housing, we can take the same platform anywhere rules, evidence and public money meet. Right now that means Los Angeles, where the City's Homes for LA Round 2 is the round we're working: we mapped its new rules within a day of them reaching City Council, and you can put your Round 2 deal into it now.
We're already running betas for EV infrastructure against California Energy Commission programs. The rules are different, but the work has the same shape and form: costs must be eligible, claims need evidence and approvals have to survive the scrutiny of regulatory and compliance demands.
Adding a new program or entering a new sector isn't a total rebuild, it's a new rulebook.
For housing developersBuilt by operators.
We come from the operator's side of the table. Today, Skumu works across operations, go-to-market, public policy, product, legal and engineering.
Founded by Jon Alain Guzik.