Executive Summary

govrn.ai is the standard for enterprise AI governance — a governance standard plus a deterministic measurement engine, on one record.

Confidential investor material · June 2026. Figures marked illustrative are placeholders pending finalization. Product status is described honestly throughout — what is built vs. what is in progress.

The thesis, in one line

Every enterprise is now spending real money on AI it cannot see, attribute, or prove — under a regulatory clock that is already running. govrn.ai is the category answer: see it, prove it, run it. A governance standard a board, auditor, and regulator accept, powered by a deterministic engine — Aperture — that measures the AI estate on a single, attributed record.

Why now

• AI adoption outran AI governance. Boards and regulators ask the same question — "is your AI governed, and can you prove it?" — and almost no one can answer.
• The forcing function is regulation, not a vendor roadmap: the EU AI Act is in force (penalties to 7% of global turnover); AI regulation is quadrupling to ~75% of world economies by 2030 (Gartner); the AI-governance platform market grows from ~$492M to $1B+ by 2030.
• Validation from the top: BCG now derives 40%+ of revenue from AI/tech and is itself ISO/IEC 42001 certified — the standard we attest to is the one the market leader already adopted.

What we have

• The standard (govrn). A productized three-lens assessment (technology · security · AI), six-framework crosswalks (NIST AI RMF, ISO/IEC 42001, EU AI Act, OWASP, ATLAS, CSF 2.0), an independent-attestation doctrine (never self-certified), and product-AI review — the AI a company ships, which is what a regulator cares about most.
• The engine (Aperture). A deterministic, metadata-only system of record that attributes AI cost and surfaces shadow AI with a dollar figure. Built and tested; no model in the measurement path — every number reproducible and audit-defensible.
• One platform, two lenses. The standard reads a typed, read-only view of the engine's record to render posture and attest. One record, two lenses, one source of truth.

The play

Stand up the entity, assemble the bench, prove it on one account — then license the process, the product, and the brand at enterprise scale. Kelly / MCG is the first channel — de-risked distribution into real enterprise accounts — not the destination. Enterprise licensing is the model; Microsoft is the horizon, for which the team already holds the relationships.

The team

An AI-first, enterprise-grade bench (see Team & Structure): founder Richard Taubin (standard, brand, GTM), CAIO Joe Saba (the engine), CTO Chris Bennett (enterprise infrastructure + senior-Microsoft relationships), CSO Roberto Lleras (data science), and full-stack engineering Sean Barlow. The people normally hired after funding are already at the table — the bench is the de-risking.

The ask

$[ amount ] (illustrative — to be set) to stand up the entity, retain the founding bench, harden the engine to enterprise grade, and land the first design-partner accounts — the work that turns a proven architecture into a licensable, category-defining standard. Full detail in Roadmap & the Ask.