I grew up in a family of lawyers, surrounded by the realities of law and regulation. From early on, I saw how much time and energy went into legal and regulatory compliance work. How manual and antiquated the work was, and how it constrained innovation. I understood both the magnitude of the challenge and the size of the opportunity. But I also knew why automation wasn’t yet possible. The technology simply wasn’t ready.
My path led me from studying math and optimization to AI research, completing my PhD more than a decade ago in this field, and then to Google X, where I spent late nights trying to figure out how to teach software how to write software. That work made something clear to me: when large language models reached maturity, they wouldn’t just improve existing workflows—they would fundamentally transform entire industries.
Once this happened, it became clear that compliance was one of those bullseye applications. The pain point is massive: every company, in every regulated industry, faces it—and the TAM is almost infinite, because there is literally no company in the world that does not face some form of regulatory obligation.. At the same time, the pressure is only increasing. Companies face a daily storm of rule changes. Over 220 new regulatory updates globally each day. The U.S. Code of Federal Regulations alone has swelled to nearly 200,000 pages, growing 18x in the last fifty years. Trying to manage that volume manually is like using a teaspoon to bail out the Titanic.
And nowhere is the burden heavier than inside legal and compliance teams, who are being asked to manage not only contracts, audits, and privacy programs, but ESG reporting, AI governance, and cyber risk, all with flat budgets. It can feel like a nonstop game of regulatory whack-a-mole: solve one issue, and three more pop up.
At the same time, compliance is also so complex and unforgiving that off-the-shelf solutions simply choke on the scale and nuance. It requires systems that can be tailored with extreme precision to meet the high accuracy standards regulators demand. The dataset itself is uniquely challenging: it isn’t neatly packaged but distributed across hundreds of regulatory bodies worldwide. A single article within one regulation can spawn hundreds of cross-references to other rules, technical standards, or enforcement actions. This is why compliance is both the biggest challenge and the biggest opportunity. Companies that innovate here will thrive; those that don’t risk being regulated or fined to death.
That conviction became Myriad.
I first met Jan fifteen years ago at Georgia Tech. Even then, he had a reputation as a world-class engineer. Friends would brag about how he could design and ship remarkable applications overnight. Since then, Jan and I have stayed close, and I’ve admired the path he’s taken. From working on graphics driver development at NVIDIA way before anyone ever heard about this company, to scaling products and building data pipelines for millions of users at Google, to leading the development of backend infrastructure and service frameworks that power Airbnb’s global platform.
Years later, when Myriad was nothing more than a fragile prototype and a few slides on my laptop, Jan came to visit me in San Francisco. I brought my computer to a bar, and after a couple of hours and a couple of drinks, he was in. That night turned a friendship into a partnership that has carried us through every high and low since.
From the beginning, Jan was my favorite person to build Myriad with. Creating compliance AI at global scale requires more than algorithms; it requires robust, reliable, enterprise-grade infrastructure. His experience as a technical lead at Airbnb, helping build the systems that power a global platform, made him the perfect fit.
What we are building is simple to describe but immensely ambitious. Myriad continuously monitors global regulations, interprets them, and translates them into company-specific actions in real time. Instead of compliance being a scramble before launch or a bottleneck during product development, it becomes a capability woven into the daily fabric of the enterprise.
Our vision is that compliance should not sit at the end of the process, surfacing concerns days before a product ships or once an audit arrives. It should be integrated into workflows from the very beginning. Imagine a world where regulatory concerns can be raised as early as the creation of a product design document, not during a last-minute review. Imagine compliance not as a department of “no,” but as an intelligent assistant embedded across the organization. Raising issues early, surfacing risks in real time, and empowering teams to move faster with confidence, not slower with fear.
This is the future we see with Myriad: regulation that is dynamic, continuous, and embedded in the way companies operate. A world where enterprises don’t just keep pace with regulatory change, but weave it into their daily operations until it becomes part of their DNA.
Where compliance isn’t kryptonite, but the secret sauce. The express lane for building trust, accelerating innovation, and winning in the market.
We’ve now raised $7.8M in seed funding from forward-thinking investors, led by Category Ventures and joined by Long Journey Ventures, 10VC, N1 Ventures, Plug and Play Tech Center, Breakwater VC, Caesar VC, BD Partners, and Preston-Werner Ventures. Alongside this, we’ve assembled an advisory board of former leaders and executives from the U.S. Treasury, the Federal Reserve Bank, GE Capital, Coface, UBS and more. This gives us the fuel and the compass to complete our mission: building the compliance infrastructure of the future.
We could not possibly be more excited.
Ralf & Jan