Welcome

A brief introduction.

Hello! The Manitou Research team is excited you’re here. We wanted to find an unobtrusive way to communicate with the general public about our company, our vision and mission, and important updates — without flooding your inboxes.

Manitou Research was incorporated in April 2024, but we begin building our primary platform, articleOne, in 2023. Why? Because legacy legislative and regulatory research tools on the market were outdated and expensive. We’ve used them all; between our team and our advisory board, we have more than thirty years of congressional experience combined, plus extensive expertise in other domains like national security, foreign policy, political campaigns, Big Tech, marketing, privacy, and more. But one thing united us from the outset: our desire to make government more efficient, effective, and accessible to everyone. We want to be the way that citizens engage with, and learn about, their government at all levels, in the United States and beyond. We know this won’t happen overnight, but we’re just getting started.

The emergence and mainstreaming of Artificial Intelligence and large-language models (LLMs) provided new opportunities to do just that. Our founder built the articleOne prototype to help with his consulting business in Washington, DC, and Northern Virginia — but we realized that our former congressional colleagues, the Fortune 500, NGOs, non-profits, academia, and the general public would benefit from the tool. So we decided to formalize our efforts.

Two initial commitments formed the basis of our guiding organizational principles: first, our commitment to privacy and security. We knew investors would be disappointed that we refuse to monetize and boost revenue by selling, trading, or sharing individually identifiable user data. This was not just a privacy-driven principle; if congressional staff or policy professionals in the nation’s capital had their data sold or made public, it would pose a national security risk. So we implemented our Privacy and other policies to provide transparent, plain-English, explanations about what data we collect, how we use and store it, and how we secure it. And we helped our investors (who are exclusively U.S. persons and entities) see the business benefit of this principle while identifying other fair and transparent ways to generate the revenue needed to sustain our mission.

Second, our commitment to ethical business practices. As public policy and technical professionals, this is important to us, and we know it is for our customers, too. AI has entered the mainstream and can today be found in nearly every facet of our personal and professional lives. But that doesn’t always mean that AI has been applied or integrated in alignment with Responsible AI principles, or that it’s appropriate for every application or scenario. To give an example, we decided from the outset that articleOne would never provide direct vote recommendations if the tool is used by a congressional office or state or local official. More broadly, it would never push a specific course of action or policy position. The intent was to make legislative, regulatory, and similar research simple, powerful, and timely.

This week, we’re excited to roll out a significantly enhanced user experience on our Basic tier. We’ll be pushing updates to our websites, such as an FAQ section that answers questions we’ve received over the past year, as well as this blog. And we’re very excited to tease the forthcoming rollout of the public beta of our Plus and Pro tiers, the latter of which is almost identical to our Government tier that will be made available in Q4 this year after undergoing security reviews and structural audits. (More on this in a future post!)

How can you help? You can follow us on X / Twitter, BlueSky, and Truth Social. We’re also on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. And if you’d like to roll your sleeves up and see firsthand how articleOne is changing the policy research landscape, sign up today for Basic, and be sure to download our companion iOS app, PolicyStream, which is included in an articleOne subscription or available for free (with ads) or minimal cost in the App Store.

Together, we’re Making Policy Intelligent. Join us!