# Pennant joins YC with AI software for institutional proxy voting > Source: > Published: 2026-08-31 18:30:00+00:00 # Pennant joins YC with AI software for institutional proxy voting **The two-person startup says its early customers include a large US public pension plan, a top law firm and governance advisors.** By [Ryan Merket](/author/ryan-merket) ยท Published Primary source: [Y Combinator](https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/pennant) ## Why it matters Pennant is testing whether domain-specific AI can loosen a proxy-advisory duopoly by giving investors custom policy tools without a JPMorgan-scale internal build. [Ryan Nowicki Stewart](https://www.ryannowickistewart.com/) and [Tomas Taylor](https://www.totaylor.com/) have taken [Pennant](https://www.getpennant.ai), their AI platform for institutional proxy voting, into [Y Combinator's Summer 2026 batch](https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/pennant), betting that investors want to set their own governance policies without building the infrastructure themselves. Pennant gives institutional investors, public companies and corporate advisors software for analyzing shareholder proposals, applying custom voting guidelines and documenting the judgments behind each decision. Its website shows tools for monitoring regulatory filings, generating policy-aligned recommendations, coordinating internal reviews and exporting voting records for Form N-PX filings. The New York company describes the product as a corporate governance operating system rather than a conventional proxy advisor. Pennant's software draws meetings, filings, proposals, vote results and engagement records into one workspace, then uses AI to surface governance risks and make recommendations based on a customer's policies. Human reviewers can approve or override those recommendations while retaining an audit trail. That structure addresses a practical problem inside stewardship teams. Institutional investors may vote across thousands of annual meetings, each carrying board elections, compensation proposals, mergers and shareholder resolutions. Research, internal notes and voting rules are often spread across filings, vendor systems and spreadsheets. Pennant is selling a single layer for the research and decision process. ### Two founders who worked both sides of the vote Stewart and Taylor met as Cornell undergraduates about 15 years ago and later worked on the same analyst desk at BlackRock, according to their YC launch materials. Stewart subsequently moved into institutional stewardship at State Street, where he engaged with portfolio companies and voted shares held for clients. He later advised boards and management teams on shareholder activism and investor engagement as a vice president at PJT Partners. Pennant says Stewart participated in proxy voting across more than 3,000 company meetings during that period. Taylor remained on the technical path. He became a product manager at BlackRock, earned an MBA from Harvard and founded Mindware, an infrastructure project for AI-agent workflows. On his personal site, Taylor says he began building Mindware after entering the AutoGPT community in 2023, before the Model Context Protocol emerged as a common way for AI applications to connect with external tools. That pairing is Pennant's core sales argument. The founders have worked inside the institutions that buy governance technology, and Stewart has used the incumbent research products Pennant wants customers to rely on less heavily. YC lists Pennant as a two-person company founded in 2026. Pennant says it already has paying enterprise customers, including one of the largest US public pension plans, a top 100 US law firm and governance advisors. The customers are unnamed, and Pennant has not published contract values or usage figures. It also says a global asset manager is working with Pennant as a design partner. ### Proxy voting is moving in-house Pennant is entering a concentrated market. Institutional Shareholder Services and Glass Lewis together hold an estimated 97% of the proxy advisory market, according to a Congressional Research Service report. Their scale reflects the volume and deadlines involved in reviewing corporate ballots, as well as years of integration into the voting systems used by large asset managers. The pressure to reduce dependence on those firms has increased. A [December 11th, 2025 executive order](https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/12/protecting-american-investors-from-foreign-owned-and-politically-motivated-proxy-advisors/?query-11-page=57) directed federal agencies to examine proxy advisors' role and fiduciary status, placing their influence under renewed political and regulatory scrutiny. Large asset managers have enough staff and capital to respond by building their own systems. JPMorgan Asset Management said it completed its move away from external proxy-advisor recommendations for US votes on April 1st, 2026. Its internal SpectrumIQ workflow analyzes data from more than 3,000 US company meetings, according to [JPMorganChase's 2025 annual report](https://www.jpmorganchase.com/ir/annual-report/2025/ar-ceo-letter-mary-callahan-erdoes). Pennant is targeting the institutions that cannot justify a comparable internal development program. Its pitch is that investors can personalize voting policies and retain control over difficult decisions while outsourcing the underlying data ingestion, monitoring and workflow software. Pennant also sells to the other participants in a shareholder vote. Public companies, law firms and bankers can use the platform to track proposals, research precedents, study a shareholder base and prepare for annual meetings. That broadens the customer pool, although it also requires Pennant to maintain clear controls between investors making voting decisions and advisors or companies attempting to influence those decisions. The product's credibility will turn on traceability. A governance recommendation can affect director elections, executive compensation and contested transactions. Pennant's emphasis on source-linked analysis, human approval and retained rationales reflects the standard its customers will need to defend to clients, compliance teams and regulators. Stewart has already inserted Pennant into that policy discussion. The SEC records a [May 8th, 2026 comment](https://www.sec.gov/comments/4-855/4-855.htm?page=0) from him in his capacity as Pennant's founder and CEO during the agency's executive compensation roundtable. Pennant's "world model" branding is broader than the product available today. The current platform is a focused set of research, policy and recordkeeping tools for proxy voting. That narrower starting point gives the founders a defined enterprise buyer, recurring annual workflows and a market where dissatisfaction with the incumbent structure is already documented. YC's bet is that two people who spent their careers inside that structure can turn the opening into software institutions will trust with an actual vote.