TL;DR: Pennant is building AI-native proxy voting solutions for institutional investors, public companies, and their advisors. We’re live with paying enterprise customers, including one of the largest US public pension plans, a Top AmLaw 100 firm, and leading governance advisors. Before Pennant, our team built trillion-dollar tech at BlackRock, cast proxy votes at State Street, and advised Fortune 100 boards at PJT.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_WDs1VB213EcPS5caE5XK7L6UkZLz07l

The problem: Proxy voting at publicly traded companies drives trillions in market value every year. Shareholder votes decide $100B mergers, trillion-dollar pay packages, and the boardroom battles that define companies.

Yet the work is brutally manual: reviewing thousands of pages of SEC filings, research, and engagement notes that live in a patchwork of PDFs, spreadsheets, and post-it notes. And for professional advice, the market has relied on two firms, ISS and Glass Lewis, for 40+ years, a duopoly that controls 97% of the market.

Why Now: Technological change and market sentiment are ripping this market wide open.

CEOs have been sounding the proxy-advisor alarm for years:

And now big investors and the White House are taking action.

JPMorgan is even building its own solution. But 99% of the investors, companies, and advisors we talk to don't want to own this themselves, or don't have the resources to. That's where Pennant comes in, and it's why we're winning business out of the gate.

Why Pennant is better: Pennant isn't a better proxy advisor. We're building something bigger: the AI-native operating system for corporate governance, built by former proxy voters and technologists, a team that cast these votes and shipped the software at institutional scale.

Pennant gives institutional investors, and the advisors and companies they engage with, voting and governance intelligence to act on their own principles at scale. Legacy tools follow rigid rules; Pennant reasons through each ballot item, inbound email, and engagement question the way your team would, handling the clear calls and flagging the nuanced ones, keeping people in the driver's seat.

As one of our customers put it last week, “[incumbent xyz] can handle our routine stuff for another year, but we’re thrilled to use Pennant for the custom heavy-lifting that we’ve been wanting to do for a long time, and use you for everything from there.”

Pennant also serves the other side of the vote: public companies, law firms, and bankers who need to read their shareholder base and predict risk before the annual meeting. Same data, bigger market. The market at the intersection of investing and corporate governance is estimated at well over $200 billion, and it remains largely unserved by today's tools.

Traction: Pennant is live with paying enterprise customers, including one of the largest US public pension plans, a Top AmLaw 100 firm, and leading governance advisors. We're partnered with a top global asset manager as a design partner and are actively engaged with S&P 500 companies. Before YC S26, Pennant was selected for Palantir's Startup Fellowship (Cohort 002).

Why us: We've known each other for 15 years, since our undergrad days at Cornell, and started our careers on the same analyst desk at BlackRock building tech products for these exact customers. We have a rare pairing: direct industry experience as the customer, plus the engineering chops to ship fast and earn trust.

After BlackRock, Ryan (CEO) was the customer for 6+ years, voting proxies at 3,000+ company meetings and advising Fortune 100 companies on how to win critical votes at PJT Partners. He used Glass Lewis and ISS every day.

Tommy (CTO) took the technical path, shipping products at BlackRock before earning his Harvard MBA and founding Mindware, where he built workflow-ready infrastructure for AI agents. He was building agentic AI before "agents" were hot, and Pennant is where his engineering background meets Ryan's proxy-voting expertise.

Our ask: If you own or touch proxy voting as an investor, advisor, or public company, we want to talk: https://calendly.com/ryan-getpennant/30min

Learn more at getpennant.ai