Capitol is an infinitely smart AI research assistant with access to your important documents, enabling you to create high-quality content instantly. You can generate informed articles, white papers, marketing content, and tweet storms. Capitol has a D2C product, and a B2B product offering for companies that want to embed real-time content creation and editing into their applications. 

Politico has exclusively partnered with Capitol to power all Politico Pro users with AI content creation for policy and regulatory analysis. 

In the future, all publishers of content and data will have an AI research layer. Capitol will be the category-defining product to unlock this transformation.
Infinitely smart research assistant that generates content from data
Title: Capitol AI: Capitol is a custom perplexity for every website in the world. | Y Combinator

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### Capitol is a custom perplexity for every website in the world.

As Perplexity or Gemini replaces the Google Search we all use today, it will remove the need to ever visit a website. This is an existential risk to all media brands, which is why Capitol went from zero to $1.68M in revenue during YC: all media companies need to offer THEIR OWN Perplexity-like experience to maintain their direct relationship with customers. The most trusted brand in political news and analysis, Politico, chose us to power their Politico Pro Subscription product. Consumers expect instant personalized answers. Publishers won’t build this on their own. Capitol’s API lights up publishers' websites and apps so their end users can generate personalized search results, cited research reports, and even tweet storms using the publisher’s proprietary data—all within their paywall. Capitol is the new last mile of content delivery for publishing. This market is $16b in 2023, and will grow to $85.6b in 2030. Gemini and Perplexity are the imperial forces. Capitol is arming the rebels.

### Jobs at Capitol AI

US / CA / Remote (US; CA)

$100K - $140K

0.10% - 1.00%

3+ years



Capitol AI

Founded:2021

Team Size:11

Location:Washington, DC

### Active Founders

### Shaun Modi, Founder & CEO

Shaun Modi is the founder and CEO of Capitol AI, an infinitely smart research assistant that instantly generates high-quality content from your documents. One of the founding designers of Airbnb, Shaun has been named one of Business Insider’s Top 75 Designers in Technology. Shaun has designed software products for technology giants, the government, and its agencies, including Google, the White House, DoD, NASA, CDC, and Motorola. At Airbnb, Shaun worked side by side with CEO Brian Chesky.



### thomas hallaran, Founder

Software engineer and technical manager with a product mindset. Two decades of experience, including IC and Director positions in academia, venture backed startups, and the US Federal Government.



### Company Launches

[### Capitol AI - Create powerful content from data](

Hey! We're Shaun and Tom from [Capitol AI]( and we’re thrilled to announce the launch of Capitol 2.0.

**TL;DR**
---------

After we got into YC, we asked ourselves: “What would Microsoft Word look like if it were built in the age of AI?” Our answer: A product that seamlessly combines deep research, generative images + text, and AI-assisted editing.

[**This is Capitol 2.0**](



**The Business Problem**

Content creation for business users is a slow, disjointed process involving multiple tools like search, proprietary databases, spreadsheets, slides, PDFs, and word processors. This complexity limits businesses with data-driven content creation workflows from scaling their content production and selling more products.

**Our Solution**
----------------

Capitol simplifies content creation by integrating research and editing into one seamless experience—automating tasks to supercharge productivity.

Capitol AI empowers enterprise customers with an API/SDK that automates the research and content creation process. It gives them the tools to personalize and scale their product offerings with less headcount.

[**Watch the video**](

**B2B Customers**
-----------------

**Enterprise**  
[Politico]( the global authority on the intersection of politics, policy, and power has exclusively partnered with Capitol to empower all [Politico Pro]( users with AI content creation for policy and regulatory analysis.

**Startups & SMB**  
For startups and small businesses with repeatable data-driven processes like Cloud GTM provider [Invisory]( and the innovative AI-powered grant platform [AI Grants]( Capitol is automating the creation of **revenue-generating** business documents with our API-accessible artifact generation pipeline.



**Why Now?**
------------

In a time when publishers are increasingly being courted by AI model builders for licensing deals, Capitol AI is arming the rebels—helping publishers compete for attention and grow their customer base by automating content generation from their high-value data. Capitol will be the category-defining product to unlock this transformation.



**Tech**
--------

Capitol includes a proprietary model orchestration, eval framework, chain of thought reasoning, and RAG pipelines that work together to enable our customers to generate and iterate on content in our product or via API.

**How Capitol Works**
---------------------

Rewrite, reformat, & transform your content



Type ‘/’ anywhere to generate new content in-line



Generate new content with a single click



### **🙏🏽 Our asks**

**1\. Try Capitol**
-------------------

Head to [ and try Capitol today.  
Get 3 months free with the special YC discount code **FOUNDERMODE**

**2\. Integrate Capitol Into Your Product!**
--------------------------------------------

Capitol’s embedded content generation will transform your application’s user experience with real-time RAG and document creation from your data. By leveraging Capitol’s API/SDK, you can drive more engagement with your product and have more time with your users. Common use cases include:

*   Give your users the ability to create bespoke reports and insights, pulling forward hard-to-find data
*   Turn enterprise document search into a content generation flow
*   Transforming your knowledge base or help center into a more helpful experience for your customers
*   Let your users create social media content directly on your site

Contact us at [founders@capitol.ai](mailto:founders@capitol.ai)



**Founders**
------------

*   [Shaun Modi]( CEO. One of the first product designers hired at Airbnb. Worked side by side with CEO Brian Chesky crafting the user experience of Airbnb. Fmr Google, Fmr Nasa, named one of Business Insider's Top 75 Designers in Technology. BFA from RISD.
*   [Tom Hallaran]( CTO. Fmr Director US AI Center of Excellence, Fmr VP of engineering at acquired adtech startup Selectable Media, Initial technical lead and architect of the largest political payment app in US. Undergrad from Columbia.

[X]( [Linkedin]( [Instagram](

#### YC Sign Photo



#### Company Photo



### Hear from the founders

#### How did you decide to apply to Y Combinator? What was your experience applying, going through the batch, and fundraising at demo day?

Brian Chesky encouraged us to apply. He hired Shaun at Airbnb. We wish we had done it earlier, but in some ways, the timing of this couldn’t be better. Brian believes the position we are in is very similar to Airbnb's right before they joined YC. And even similar dynamics to when Justin Kan made the last-minute referral for Airbnb’s founders (Brian, Joe, and Nate) to join YC. Going through the batch has been an incredible experience. Garry, Ooshma, and Aaron are phenomenal partners to work with and boil down opportunities and challenges to overcome to their essence. We’ve made huge strides in the batch regarding product velocity and customer acquisition. We’ve signed a $1.3m customer term sheet with one of the most influential media brands during YC!

#### What's the history of your company from getting started until the present day? What were the big inflection points?

Tom and I were collaborating on Covid-19 logistics applications leveraging AI models for HHS and the US DoD and the interfaces that prime USG integrators like IBM, SAP, and Deloitte produced were unusable. We saw an opportunity to develop integration and design standards for creating intelligent content leveraging models, and Capitol AI was born. We started the company with a contract from the 2nd largest health insurer in the US to automate data storytelling for their self-insured employer business line. We approached this problem with a mix of classical and bayesian statistical analysis and automating insight generation leveraging DBT. After GPT 3.5 was released we saw an opportunity to center our product stack around LLMs. We made a pivot away from healthcare and so that we could collect user data and feedback to move the product forward as quickly as possible. We now have built a product that is in high demand we just closed a $1.3m enterprise contract, with more to come.

#### What is your long-term vision? If you truly succeed, what will be different about the world?

In the future, all content and data publishers will have an AI research layer. Capitol will be the category-defining product that unlocks this transformation, creating a more useful and personalized internet.

### Selected answers from Capitol AI's original YC application for the S24 Batch

#### Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.

Create documents that convince, persuade & educate

#### How long have each of you been working on this? How much of that has been full-time? Please explain.

Just under 3 years, full time.

#### What is your company going to make? Please describe your product and what it does or will do.

Capitol is building a product that makes it easy to create content to convince, persuade and educate an audience. The product is a fast way to create text, image and data rich documents. Capitol is like a ghostwriter, researcher, and intuitive document editor all in one.

### YC S24 Application Video
