AI is reshaping how companies are built, but the legal entity underneath has not caught up. We're building Matter as the operating infrastructure for the company — turning a corporation into something agents can run. The foundation for an era of Agentic Entities.
Start with what has already changed: what gets built, who builds it, and how far one person can take it. The shift is happening in layers.
Coding agents are catching up to intent. The agent reads the prompt, writes the code, runs the tests, and ships the build. What used to be a developer hopping between docs and files is now a conversation.
One person can now direct a workforce of agents. The knowledge that once gated company-building isn't scarce anymore — and neither is the headcount. What used to take an engineer, a designer, an ops person, and a marketer is increasingly one person directing a set of agents. The team of twelve becomes a team of three; the team of three becomes one founder.
Specialized agents are filling in the rest. Marketing agents find and convert customers. Legal agents draft and review contracts. Finance agents set pricing and track what's owed. Support agents close the loop with users. Each layer that used to need a hire, a vendor, or a service contract becomes something an agent can call on demand.
At some point, a project crosses a line. Money moves, investors commit, the first teammate joins, customers depend on what shipped. Now it has to be a company — legal existence, ownership, governance, compliance, banking, contracts. And every one of those runs on a layer that hasn't caught up to anything else AI has touched.
The legal entity at the core of every company — its existence, its ownership, who can sign for it, who can spend its money — is still a paper construct, built for human speed. The information about it is scattered across filings, PDFs, spreadsheets, state portals, and people's memories. Every real change moves at the speed of forms and clerks.
Every layer above the company now moves at agent speed. The layer underneath is still paper.
For founders to build at the speed AI allows, the entity itself has to become agentic. That's what we're building: the Agentic Entity.
The Agentic Entity is a company that's programmable end to end — callable verifiable composable closeable. Callable: every operation on the company is a single call. Verifiable: every answer about it is provable, in real time. Composable: the calls combine into the bigger moves — a round, an expansion, an exit. Closeable: when its work is done, it closes as cleanly as it opened. When the entity itself is programmable, the company changes as fast as the decisions are made.
This pattern has played out before — cloud computing, payments, communications. Each time, a layer underneath became programmable and the pace of everything above it sped up. Entities are next — and they need new operating infrastructure built for them.
Matter doesn't replace the State of Delaware, the IRS, or your bank — those remain the primary legal records. Matter is the layer above them: it holds the company's state in one place, executes operations against the underlying systems on the company's behalf, and produces verifiable answers any counterparty can read in real time.
Today, the picture of a company is stitched together by hand from a dozen places. Ownership lives in a cap-table tool, the certificate of incorporation in a state portal, the share certificates in a lawyer's vault, the EIN letter in a founder's email, board consents in a signing tool, treasury in a bank dashboard, tax filings with an accountant. Ask "what is the current state of this company?" and the answer comes from cross-referencing all of them — and the copies routinely disagree.
Matter collapses those dozen places into one. Every operation reads from and writes to the same place. No reconciliation. No copy-of-a-copy. One picture of the company, at any moment.
Today, running a company is an unending stream of small obligations. Hiring your first employee means a board consent, a cap-table update, a grant agreement, and a tax election with a hard deadline. Bringing on an advisor means another grant and another consent. Operating in a new state means a foreign qualification, a registered agent, and a fresh compliance calendar. And the annual reports — Delaware every March, plus each state where you operate — keep coming. Each lives in a different system, with a different deadline, tracked by a different person.
Every action that touches the company's state should be a single, predictable operation. Those operations combine into flows for the bigger life events — a fundraising round, an officer change, an expansion, a merger, an exit. Matter orchestrates every step, rolls back what's reversible, and refuses to start steps whose downstream effects can't be undone.
Authority works the way it always has — granted by the board, scoped like an officer's. An agent acts under a mandate with limits, every action is checked against that mandate before it commits, and anything irreversible can be queued behind a human sign-off. Trust is a dial, not a leap.
Today, verifying a company means waiting on paper — a good-standing certificate that takes five business days, a cap-table screenshot a founder emails over, a board-composition PDF that may already be stale. Most counterparties re-key the answer every time they ask. On Matter, a bank, an investor, or a regulator queries the company directly and gets a fast, signed answer with the full audit history attached — every change recorded as the actual filing, not a copy of one.
Put the three together, and the entity stops being a paper construct and becomes a real, programmable object — a company that agents (and humans) can read, write, and verify in real time. The first version of this is live today — and we think the future is even more interesting.
What follows is one founder's journey. Maya Lewis turns her Sprig project into Sprig, Inc. — and everything she does here, Matter does today. Form a company in any US state.
Anyone can be a founder. A student with an idea, an engineer with a side project, a small team ready to make it real. Starting the company is as simple as describing what you want — Matter forms the entity, issues the founder stock, obtains the EIN, names the registered agent, connects the operating account, sets up the cap table, schedules the first board consent, and registers for the right taxes — twelve steps in all.
Minutes later, the founder has a working company. The journey begins here.
Now the work begins. The first person joins Sprig. Adding a teammate today usually means five separate steps — getting board sign-off on the option grant, updating the cap table, pulling the latest valuation, signing the grant agreement, and, for an early-exercised grant, filing the 83(b) election within thirty days of exercise (a deadline that's easy to miss). Any one of them can quietly slip, and the founder only finds out months later.
On Matter, the founder describes what they want — the role, the equity — and Matter fills in the rest from the company's plan defaults. Every step lands together, or none of them do.
Sprig grows. Customers and contractors arrive from new states, and Sprig needs to be properly registered to do business in each of them. Today, foreign qualification is a separate filing with each Secretary of State, a separate registered agent, a separate annual-report deadline — every state with its own portal, its own form, its own clock.
On Matter, the founder names the states. Matter does the rest. Each filing is wired up, each annual-report deadline is tracked, each renewal self-files.
Sprig, a few years on. What changes isn't the operations — it's how far the agent is trusted to run them. Today the agent executes intent in the moment: you ask, it commits. The next leap is the agent acting on the company's behalf across longer horizons — under the same mandates, against the same policies, onto the same audit chain. Nothing below requires new operations — the same calls you just saw, composed differently and trusted further. That world is where this goes.
The full board cycle — agenda, materials, calendar, quorum, votes, minutes, filings — runs in the background. A secretary agent drives the meeting and every director's agent votes on the director's behalf. The board meets without any human in the room — the founders see the result, not the work.
New markets sometimes mean new entities — a foreign subsidiary for a new region, a holding company for an international structure, a research arm for a long-horizon project. The parent's agent opens them ahead of demand, on the parent's authority, following the rules the founders set when the parent was formed — as it did for Sprig Studio, the design arm it opened last spring. Matter executes, and the founders see the result on their next review.
Companies start doing business with other companies directly, in seconds. Founder agents negotiate term sheets with investor agents. Vendor agents onboard customer agents. Treasury agents settle with counterparty treasury agents. Both sides prove they're authorized to act, the deal locks in for both at once or not at all, and the full decision trail is recorded on both ledgers. Flows that used to take weeks of email and signature-chasing close in seconds.
Not every entity is meant to last forever. Some are made for a single project, a single quarter, a single experiment. Opening and closing a company are equally easy — the agent that opened the entity is the agent that closes it. IP rolls back to the parent, the money sweeps to the parent's account, the equity clears, the filings unwind, and the audit chain is preserved indefinitely.
Matter today is that foundation in its earliest form — formation, governance, equity, filings, tax, and exit. Formation is live in every US state; the deeper rails arrive jurisdiction by jurisdiction. The future above is what we are building toward, one operation at a time.
The next decade is about transforming the entity itself. As more of a company's operating cadence moves to agents, the entity will need new shapes — including entities where no human is in the loop. We plan to build for them too.
We are quietly assembling a small founding team — engineers, designers, lawyers, operators — people who care deeply about the next generation of founders.