Every US company is required by law to have one. About 33 million do. It's the role through which a company talks to the state, and one piece of how a company works that hasn't been rebuilt yet. So we're rebuilding it — as the agent itself, so the next generation of companies can finally be run, in part, by software.
Every US company has a registered agent. It is a legally-required role — the name and street address the state writes to, the place a court can serve papers, the counterparty a regulator is allowed to talk to. About 33 million LLCs and corporations carry one today. About five million more are formed every year.
The job has barely changed in thirty years. An envelope arrives. Someone scans it. An email goes out — sometimes the next day, sometimes the next week. A certificate of good standing is a PDF you ask for and then wait for. None of this is broken, exactly. It just hasn't been thought about in a long time, even though it touches every company in the country.
There's a simple reason the role can't easily be done from the outside. The papers go to a specific name and a specific street address, written into the state's record. The state, the court, and the regulator all talk to that name on the page. If we want this role to live inside software, the software has to be the name on the page.
Once the role lives inside software, the things the state sends become events a piece of software can read — and, because we are the named agent on the filing, events a piece of software can act on, and have it count. A franchise-tax notice arrives; an AI agent reads it, pulls the money, files the return, writes back to the state — in a few seconds, with the founder's standing instructions, and with us co-signing the work as the named agent. A court summons arrives; an agent routes it to counsel, opens the matter, sets the deadline, and starts the response, before anyone has had to check an inbox. An annual report comes due; an agent files it and moves on.
That kind of autonomy only works if the role and the software live in the same place. Being the agent of record is what lets matter sign for the company — and have the state, the court, and the company itself accept what was just done.
We think the next generation of companies will look something like this. Founders running more entities at scale. Companies stood up for an experiment and closed cleanly a few months later. Holding structures with subsidiaries opened and folded back up by software. Things a person sets going, and software keeps faithfully running in the background, the way payroll and banking already do.
For any of that to be real, the role at the heart of every company has to become something software can hold. So we're going to hold it.