Class Note 2022. Imagine you’re Glenn Youngkin, the governor of Virginia. Making the state more efficient was your campaign promise, but you find yourself staring at a web of statutes, regulations, and case law, state and federal, in one of the most niche corners of law—administrative law. It seems impossible to find the starting point to untangle everything. Three options land on your desk: hire a slow legacy consultant, retain an expensive specialty law firm, or take a leap of faith on Tanner Jones’ young AI startup Vulcan Technologies. Gov. Youngkin took the leap and saw a more than 30-percent reduction in nonmandatory regulatory requirements in his state.
Instead of piling onto the convoluted framework that exists today, Vulcan used AI to identify which regulations are necessary, redundant, or no longer enforceable because underlying statutes were repealed. As a result, there are now far fewer hoops to jump through: Building a new home is $24,000 cheaper on average, and Virginia citizens save more than $1.2 billion each year thanks to the reduction of regulatory red tape.
Tanner founded Vulcan Technologies in April 2025 to “replace Deloitte, McKinsey, Accenture, and expensive lawyers with AI, serving both government and industry.” The company built a comprehensive database of American law and uses thousands of AI agents to analyze regulatory provisions across all U.S. jurisdictions, comparing them against the full body of federal and state statutory and case law to determine which regulations are required and which fall outside their legal scope. This helps the government lawfully implement policy and industry comply and contest government regulation.
Fragmented across agencies, states, and legal sources, regulatory law is designed to be read by a few, not many, and only a handful of law schools provide lawyers with the proper toolkit. “Administrative law is an elective in law school and is taught well at only the top five schools,” Tanner said. Government agencies are accustomed to paying for highly specialized consultants and lawyers when writing, amending, or enforcing a regulation. Similarly, the most regulated firms are comfortable spending millions to ensure they comply with these same regulations.
Vulcan built a much more accessible and cost-effective way to not just comply with the rules but also understand and optimize them. The value-add was undeniable. Gov. Youngkin recognized it, and so did Y Combinator, the most influential startup incubator boasting a 0.4-percent acceptance rate and alumni including OpenAI, Airbnb, Doordash, Stripe, and Reddit. Vulcan just graduated from Y Combinator’s summer 2025 cohort.
At Dartmouth Tanner studied politics, philosophy, economics, and classics, initially preparing for a career in law. During Covid in 2020, he took a gap year to first work for Andrew Yang’s presidential campaign and then, when Yang dropped out of the race, launched his first tech startup with a high school friend, using AI to power 37 local political campaigns across seven states. Tanner was accepted into Harvard Law School in 2023 while working for Texas tech entrepreneur and Palantir founder Joe Lonsdale; meanwhile, he and former powerlifting teammate Alek Mekhanik ’26 began exploring how to transform legacy consulting with AI and empower organizations to navigate the complex field of regulatory law.
What began as a weekend project quickly turned into a business. Within 10 days of incorporating, Vulcan pitched Gov. Youngkin and won a statewide contract. Tanner hired several friends, including Nate Branscum ’24, and now runs a six-person team based in Austin, Texas, with $10.9 million in seed investment backed by General Catalyst, Cubit Capital, and Trevor Rees-Jones ’73. Vulcan’s tools are live in the U.S. Department of Education, state governments in South Carolina and Virginia, and several firms across the country.
—Louisa Gao, 154 E 29th St., New York, NY 10016; louisa.gao0922@gmail.com