This episode of The Next Biz Thing looks at Labrynth, a RegTech platform built to turn regulatory complexity into a competitive advantage rather than a cost of doing business. Markus J. Diplama walks through the Regulatory Intelligence Engine and the Red Tape Index, the agentic workflows behind faster submissions, and why a system that serves regulators as well as the enterprises submitting to them changes the incentives entirely. The conversation spans eight regulated domains, from construction permitting and energy licensing to pensions, patents and supply chain, and asks what happens to competition when approval stops being the bottleneck. Have a listen.
Have you ever stopped to think about how much of the modern economy is simply standing in line? Not waiting for a product to be invented, not waiting for customers to show up, not waiting for funding to clear. Just waiting for permission. Waiting for a form to be read. Waiting for a licence to be granted. Waiting for someone, somewhere, to work through a stack of documents and eventually say yes. We rarely talk about that waiting, because it is nobody's exciting story. But it is where an enormous amount of time, money and ambition quietly goes to sit.
Welcome back to The Next Biz Thing. I am Markus J. Diplama, and the whole point of this show is to find the companies building the things the rest of us will be relying on in a few years without ever really noticing. Sometimes that is a product you can hold in your hand. Today it is something far less visible and, I would argue, quite a bit more consequential. Today we are looking at the machinery of approval itself, and at a company that has decided the whole thing is overdue for a rebuild. The company is called Labrynth.
Labrynth describes itself with a line I keep turning over in my head. Where regulated enterprises accelerate. Sit with that for a second, because it inverts something most of us assume without questioning it. We tend to treat regulation as the brake. It is the thing that slows the good idea down, the tax you pay for operating in a serious industry. Labrynth takes the opposite view. They call themselves the execution layer that turns regulatory complexity into a competitive advantage. Not a way around the rules. A way through them, faster and more reliably than anyone else in your market can manage.
Their mission statement is refreshingly plain about the ambition involved. They want to establish global best practices across regulated industries, and then make those practices simple to execute. Those are two very different jobs, and I think it is worth separating them. Working out what good looks like in a heavily regulated field is hard. Making it something an ordinary team can actually do on an ordinary Tuesday is harder still, and it is the part most people give up on.
So how does it actually work? At the centre of the platform sits what they call a Regulatory Intelligence Engine, powered by something they have named the Red Tape Index. The Index tracks rules, precedents and emerging requirements, which means the system is not working from a static snapshot of the law as it existed whenever someone last updated a spreadsheet. It is following the shape of the rules as they move. Anyone who has worked in a regulated field knows how much quiet damage a stale interpretation can do. You do everything correctly according to a guidance note that was superseded eight months ago, and you find out at exactly the worst moment.
Built on top of that engine are the things that actually touch a working day. There are agentic workflows tuned to specific regulatory domains. There is intelligent document preparation for regulatory submissions, which is a polite way of describing one of the most soul destroying jobs in professional life. And there is live monitoring and compliance tracking, so the state of things is something you can look at rather than something you reconstruct in a panic before an audit. The promise they put on it is blunt: days, not months, to approval.
What struck me most, though, is the breadth. Labrynth works across eight regulatory domains, and reading the list tells you something about how the company thinks. Building and construction. Healthcare services. Anti fraud systems. Energy licensing, including nuclear. Payroll compliance. Pensions. Patent and intellectual property. Supply chain. Those are wildly different worlds with wildly different vocabularies, and the fact that one platform stretches across all of them says the underlying insight is not really about any single industry. It is about the shape of the problem. Somebody has to prove to somebody else that a thing is permitted, and the proving is slow.
There is another detail I find genuinely clever. The platform works in both directions. It serves the enterprises submitting, and it serves the regulators reviewing. That is unusual. Most compliance tools pick a side and optimise hard for it, which tends to mean helping one party push more material at the other. Sitting on both sides of the table changes the incentive. You are no longer trying to win the exchange, you are trying to make the exchange work.
And there is evidence that it does. On their site a plan reviewer for a city in Los Angeles County reports that review time went from five to seven hours down to one to two. I want to be careful here, because that is one voice and one workflow. But notice who is speaking. That is not the applicant celebrating a faster approval. That is the reviewer, the person on the other side, saying their own day got better. When a tool makes the referee's job easier as well as the player's, something real is happening.
The company is also quite deliberate about what it is not. Labrynth is emphatic that it is a platform, not a consultancy, and their phrase for the difference is compounding intelligence rather than point solutions. Consulting expertise walks out of the door at the end of the engagement. A point solution fixes one bottleneck and leaves the next one untouched. What they are building is meant to accumulate, and they put it simply: every deployment makes the next one smarter. Domain knowledge gets codified into the product rather than living in the heads of whoever happened to be on the project.
That codified, domain specific approach seems to matter for quality too. Client feedback highlighted on their site points to the elimination of hallucinations in the outputs, and in this particular context that is not a nice to have. In a regulated submission, a confidently invented citation is not an amusing quirk of the technology. It is a serious problem with real consequences. Narrowing an AI system to a domain where the rules are known and tracked is one of the more sensible answers anyone has offered to that risk.
The supporting details fit the same picture. Labrynth is ISO 27001 and AICPA SOC compliant, which is the sort of thing regulated buyers ask about before they ask about anything else. The platform integrates with the AI providers you would expect, including Anthropic, Google Gemini and Mistral, and runs alongside AWS and Google Cloud. It also connects to the enterprise systems where this work actually lives, things like Salesforce, Workday and SAP. That last part is easy to skim past, but it is often the difference between software that gets adopted and software that gets admired and then quietly ignored.
Behind it is a team that has clearly thought about how it wants to operate. Labrynth is led by chief executive Stuart Lacey, with Sameen Kashfi running operations, Renan Lima leading engineering, Harold Schultz Neto heading product, Athena Visel leading governance, risk and compliance, and Philip Johnson, Chris Kuz and Daniel Zaitsev covering sales, customer success and marketing. The board includes co founder and adviser Francis Pedraza alongside Brennan Pothetes, Adam Haney, Wes Green and William James Haynes the second. The company lists five values: alignment, character, competency, togetherness and impact. Character sitting that high in the list is a choice, and in a business built on regulatory trust it is the right one.
So why does any of this matter beyond the companies directly involved? Because I think we are watching a shift in what regulation means competitively. For decades the assumption was that heavy regulation protects incumbents. The rules are complex, complexity is expensive, and only large organisations can afford to carry the overhead. That assumption is starting to wobble. If the complexity can be handled by a system that knows the domain, tracks the rules as they change and prepares the submission properly the first time, then the advantage stops belonging to whoever has the biggest compliance department. It starts belonging to whoever executes best.
And think about what sits on the other side of those queues. Housing that has not been permitted yet. Energy projects that are not connected yet. Healthcare services not yet approved. Patents not yet granted. Every month spent waiting is a month the thing does not exist for the people who need it. Speeding that up is not just a productivity story for the businesses involved. It is a story about how quickly useful things reach the world.
That is why Labrynth caught my attention. Not because regulatory technology is glamorous, because it very much is not, but because this is one of those unglamorous foundations that quietly determines how fast everything built on top of it can move.
If you work anywhere near construction permitting, healthcare, energy licensing, pensions, payroll, patents, fraud prevention or supply chain, and you have ever watched a good project sit still while paperwork made its slow way through a system, I would encourage you to go and look them up and read about the Red Tape Index for yourself. And if you are on the regulator's side of that table, I would say the same thing with even more feeling, because the version of this that works for everyone is the one where your job gets easier too.
That is all for today. Thank you for spending this time with me. If this episode gave you something to think about, share it with someone who spends more of their working life waiting for approvals than they would like to admit. I am Markus J. Diplama, this has been The Next Biz Thing, and I will see you next time.