{"id":108348,"title":"Stratum Industries - clearing the entire U.S. Government backlog","tagline":"AI agents that review government applications end-to-end, so backlogs that took years clear in minutes.","body":"**TL;DR**\n\nStratum builds AI agents that clear the U.S. government's backlog. A reviewer drops in an application, picks the rubric to check it against, and an agent plans, executes, and reviews the file end to end. Hundreds run in parallel with a human approving every decision, so a backlog that used to take months clears in the time it took to review one file.\n\n**The Problem**\n\nEvery permit, license, patent, drug approval, grants and benefits claim in America has to be reviewed by a government adjudicator, on software built decades before AI. The result is millions of applications stuck in queues, and real people waiting months or years: veterans on disability ratings, families on pensions, builders on permits. The approval isn't the problem. The software it runs on is.\n\n**How Stratum Works**\n\n1. A reviewer drops in an application and selects the rubric it needs to be checked against.\n2. An agent reads every page and checks the file against that rubric.\n3. Every step routes to the model that reviews it most accurately for the least cost.\n4. Anything missing goes back to the applicant as one specific request.\n5. The officer gets the whole file summarized, with every citation behind it, and approves or denies it.\n\nHundreds of these run in parallel in the cloud, with full auditability at every step, and a person always makes the final call.\n\n![uploaded image](/media/?type=post\u0026id=108348\u0026key=user_uploads/1648613/15e81a7e-32ca-4280-9822-bc49caed3028)\n\n**The Vision**\n\nIn a couple of years, dealing with the government should feel as frictionless as booking an Uber or paying with Apple Pay. You tell your Stratum agent what you need, a permit, a license, a claim, and it fills out the application and submits it. On the other side, the government's Stratum agents review it, ask your agent for anything missing, and settle it between themselves. The decision comes back the same day, in minutes. No waiting weeks or months. Clearing today's backlog is only the beginning.\n\n**Team**\n\nWe're Vihaan and Raj, brothers. Vihaan was founding engineer #3 at Cadastral (acquired by Legora) and dropped out of Waterloo to build Stratum. Raj led GTM at Deel, averaging 220% of quota over two years and ranking top 5 of 1,000+ reps globally, and dropped out of grad school at Bath to build Stratum.\n\n![uploaded image](/media/?type=post\u0026id=108348\u0026key=user_uploads/1648613/40ac0440-bf77-46cf-b30e-370f734c3203)\n\n**Our Ask**\n\n* Do you work in government and struggle with a review backlog? We want to talk. Email [founders@stratumindustries.co](mailto:founders@stratumindustries.co)\n* Know someone who runs adjudication at a federal, state, or local agency? Intro us.","slug":"SBY-stratum-industries-clearing-the-entire-u-s-government-backlog","created_at":"2026-07-30T01:21:28.889Z","updated_at":"2026-09-18T20:48:03.257Z","total_vote_count":2,"url":"https://www.ycombinator.com/launches/SBY-stratum-industries-clearing-the-entire-u-s-government-backlog","share_image_url":"https://www.ycombinator.com/media/?type=post\u0026id=108348\u0026key=user_uploads/1648613/40ac0440-bf77-46cf-b30e-370f734c3203","company":{"id":32523,"name":"Elite","slug":"elite","url":"https://elitehq.ai/","logo":"https://bookface-images.s3.amazonaws.com/small_logos/43b0b3923cf1e5272885bc93999098a208c85926.png","batch":"Summer 2026","industry":"Healthcare","tags":["Healthcare","AI"],"search_path":"https://bookface.ycombinator.com/company/32523"}}