Before Evan Burns was building an AI-powered intelligence platform tracked by a third of America’s elected officials, he was selling canned cocktails. Evan Burns State Affairs is a founder story that starts, improbably, on a trip to Finland, where Burns discovered a fizzy, citrus-and-gin drink called Long Drink and decided to bring it to the United States.
That instinct for spotting an underbuilt category turned out to be reusable: Burns is now the co-founder and CEO of State Affairs, an Atlanta and Miami-based company that just raised $70 million to build what its backers are calling the Bloomberg Terminal for policy.
Here is how a beverage entrepreneur ended up building one of govtech’s more unusual funding stories of 2026.
From a Finnish Drink to a Policy Intelligence Platform
Burns’ path to State Affairs runs through a category of business about as far from policy intelligence as it’s possible to get. In 2018, he co-founded The Long Drink Company with three Finnish co-founders, bringing a canned version of Finland’s national cocktail, originally commissioned by the Finnish government for the 1952 Helsinki Olympics, to the U.S. market. The brand grew fast enough to be called one of the fastest-growing spirits in the world, backed in part by actor Miles Teller as an investor and public champion of the product.
By September 2021, Burns had moved on to a very different kind of category-building: co-founding State Affairs with Jamie Roberts Seltzer, a general partner at the media-focused venture firm LightShed Ventures, according to his LinkedIn profile. The company has since grown into a platform used by roughly a third of U.S. state and federal elected officials.
Who Is Evan Burns?
Evan Burns, whose full name is Brady Evan Burns, is originally from Jasper, Indiana, and earned a Bachelor of Arts in economics from Indiana University Bloomington. Before Long Drink, he founded a company called Odyssey in 2009, and later co-founded Ani Energy in 2020, giving him a run of four separate ventures across beverage, energy, and now media-and-policy technology within roughly a decade.
That range is unusual even by serial-founder standards. Most repeat founders stay within one industry or problem space; Burns has moved from consumer beverages to policy intelligence with no obvious industry through-line connecting them, aside from a consistent instinct for identifying categories that lack a dominant, well-resourced player.
The Problem State Affairs Set Out to Solve
State legislative activity has surged in recent years, while the systems available to track and understand it have remained fragmented, slow, and largely manual. Burns has framed the core insight behind State Affairs directly: policy and regulatory markets are often more impactful to organizations than financial markets, yet voters, companies, and even elected officials themselves are frequently the last to know what’s happening inside them.
That gap, well-documented financial markets versus poorly tracked policy markets, is the specific asymmetry State Affairs is built to close, combining original journalism with AI-driven structured data rather than relying on either alone.
Building State Affairs: Team, Journalism, and AI
State Affairs pairs one of the nation’s largest networks of embedded statehouse reporters, 76 in total, with an AI knowledge graph that tracks legislation, regulations, and hearings across all 50 states and the federal government. The company’s newsroom produces more than 2,000 originally reported, nonpartisan articles each month, which feed directly into the AI layer rather than existing as a separate editorial product.
Veteran journalist Alison Bethel serves as founding editor-in-chief and chief content officer, overseeing that reporting operation. The combination, human-reported original journalism as a proprietary data source, plus AI structuring that data at scale, is what State Affairs and its investors describe as a genuine data moat rather than a purely technical one, since competitors without an equivalent journalism network cannot easily replicate the underlying data.
Inside State Affairs’ $70 Million in Funding
Evan Burns State Affairs has raised $70 million in total funding across four rounds since its first round in 2020, with the most recent close announced July 14, 2026. The round was led by Founders Fund and Khosla Ventures, with participation from Tru Arrow Partners and Alumni Ventures.
The round’s individual backers are notable in their own right: Marcus Brauchli, former executive editor of The Washington Post and former managing editor of The Wall Street Journal; Alex Mather and Adam Hansmann, founders of The Athletic; and Richard Sarnoff, chairman of media, education, and entertainment at KKR. Burns has said the company plans to use the funding to accelerate its intelligence platform, expand its newsroom operations, and continue hiring full-time reporters to broaden its policy and regulatory coverage.
Traction: A Third of Elected Officials, Plus Walmart and Mastercard
State Affairs says its platform is currently used by roughly one-third of U.S. state and federal elected officials, alongside enterprise customers including Walmart, Mastercard, and McDonald’s. That combination, meaningful public-sector adoption plus recognizable enterprise logos, is an unusually broad customer base for a company operating in a category as specific as policy and regulatory intelligence.
The company’s original reporting output, more than 2,000 articles monthly across its statehouse network, functions as both a public-facing journalism product and the raw material for its AI platform, giving State Affairs two distinct revenue motions built on the same underlying newsroom investment.
The Investors and Media Executives Backing Evan Burns
Founders Fund and Khosla Ventures leading a $70 million round signals substantial institutional conviction, but the individual investor roster is arguably the more distinctive signal here. Having Marcus Brauchli, Alex Mather, Adam Hansmann, and Richard Sarnoff all participate, four people with deep, direct experience building and running serious media organizations, suggests State Affairs’ journalism-plus-AI model is being evaluated and endorsed specifically by people who understand original reporting as a genuine competitive moat, not just a costly feature layered onto a software product.
That mix of traditional venture capital and media-industry insiders mirrors a pattern seen elsewhere in specialized-vertical startups: investors with direct domain credibility often matter as much to a funding round’s credibility as the lead firm’s check size.
State Affairs’ Position in the Policy Intelligence Race
State Affairs has positioned itself explicitly as the “Bloomberg Terminal for policy,” an ambitious comparison that stakes out ownership of an entire category rather than competing feature-by-feature against existing legislative tracking tools. Most existing competitors in the space rely primarily on structured government data without a comparable original-journalism layer, giving State Affairs a differentiated data source even where the underlying AI capabilities may be similar.
Whether that comparison holds up will likely depend on whether State Affairs can sustain its 76-reporter newsroom at scale, since the model’s core differentiation depends entirely on continuing to fund original journalism at a level competitors relying purely on public records and AI aren’t structured to match.
What’s Next for State Affairs
With fresh capital in hand, State Affairs’ near-term priorities center on expanding its intelligence platform, growing its newsroom with additional full-time reporters, and deepening adoption among both public-sector officials and enterprise customers navigating regulatory complexity. The company’s dual customer base, government officials and Fortune 500 enterprises, gives it two distinct expansion paths to pursue simultaneously.
Burns has framed the mission in terms of urgency rather than incremental improvement, arguing that organizations across sectors need to move from reactive awareness of policy changes to proactive engagement with policy markets at scale, a shift State Affairs is betting its combined journalism-and-AI model is uniquely positioned to enable.
Lessons for Entrepreneurs From Evan Burns’ Journey
Burns’ path offers a distinctive lesson for founders considering a pivot into an entirely unrelated industry: the transferable skill wasn’t domain expertise, it was the ability to identify an underbuilt category and build the infrastructure, whether a beverage brand or a media platform, needed to own it. Second, co-founding State Affairs with Jamie Roberts Seltzer, an active venture investor at LightShed Ventures rather than an operator, gave the company early access to the kind of media-industry network reflected in its investor list.
Third, recruiting a genuine editorial veteran in Alison Bethel to lead the journalism side of the business, rather than treating content as a secondary feature to the AI product, appears to be central to how investors are valuing the company’s data moat.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Evan Burns? Evan Burns, full name Brady Evan Burns, is the co-founder and CEO of State Affairs. He previously co-founded The Long Drink Company, a Finnish beverage brand, and Ani Energy, before co-founding State Affairs in 2021.
What does State Affairs do? State Affairs is an AI-powered intelligence platform that tracks legislation, regulations, and hearings across all 50 U.S. states and the federal government, combining original statehouse journalism with structured AI data.
How much funding has State Affairs raised? State Affairs has raised $70 million total across four funding rounds, with the most recent round announced July 14, 2026, led by Founders Fund and Khosla Ventures, with participation from Tru Arrow Partners and Alumni Ventures.
Who co-founded State Affairs with Evan Burns? State Affairs was co-founded by Evan Burns and Jamie Roberts Seltzer, a general partner at LightShed Ventures. Veteran journalist Alison Bethel serves as founding editor-in-chief and chief content officer.
Who uses State Affairs? State Affairs says its platform is used by roughly one-third of U.S. state and federal elected officials, along with enterprise customers including Walmart, Mastercard, and McDonald’s.
What did Evan Burns do before State Affairs? Before State Affairs, Burns co-founded The Long Drink Company in 2018, bringing a Finnish beverage brand to the U.S. market, and also founded Odyssey in 2009 and co-founded Ani Energy in 2020.
Conclusion
Evan Burns State Affairs is a reminder that the most useful founder skill isn’t always deep industry expertise; sometimes it’s a repeatable instinct for finding a category with real demand and no dominant player yet, whether that category is Nordic beverages or state legislative data. With $70 million raised, a newsroom of 76 embedded statehouse reporters, and adoption from both government officials and Fortune 500 enterprises, State Affairs is now testing whether that instinct scales into something as ambitious as its own “Bloomberg Terminal for policy” framing suggests.
For more founder stories in AI-driven information platforms, see Ed Bellis’s Empirical Security and Baran Ataş’s Talp on Denote Press.
