He left high school to build a company. Then he left Stanford to build a bigger one - an AI that reads the world's government budgets and hands you the map.
Jarren Reid. Twenty-one years old, and already fluent in a language most executives never learn: the federal budget.
The federal government spends money the way an ocean holds water - vast, constant, and almost impossible to point at any single drop. Jarren Reid built a machine that points.
Reid is 21, and he is the CEO and co-founder of Usul, a Y Combinator-backed startup that does something deceptively dull-sounding and quietly enormous: it watches roughly $8 trillion in annual government spending across more than 60 nations, then tells a company exactly where it fits. Defense. IT. Energy. Healthcare. The platform reads the demand signal and hands back a shortlist of contracts, the funding lines behind them, and the actual humans who sign off.
Usul calls itself, plainly, "PitchBook for Government." The pitch lands because the problem is real. Selling to the Pentagon is not like selling to anyone else. The budget is public, technically, but it is scattered across thousands of documents, program codes, and acquisition rules written in a dialect only insiders speak. Contractors burn weeks answering questions that should take minutes: Who is buying this? Is there money for it? Which regulation applies? Reid's answer was to teach an AI the dialect.
He did not arrive at this from the outside. Reid grew up around defense contractors and worked for several of them - Palantir and MITRE among them - while he was still young enough that most people his age were filling out college applications. He left high school to start his first company. Later he went to Stanford to study computer science, and there, in a course called Hacking for Defense, the idea for Usul found him. He and his co-founders talked to more than 200 people working in and around the Department of Defense. The same complaint kept surfacing. The system worked against the people trying to use it.
So he left Stanford too. Twice now he has walked out of an institution mid-story because the thing he wanted to build could not wait for a diploma.
Strip away the branding and the product is an interpreter. It identifies active defense programs relevant to a given technology. It maps which competitors have already won in that space. It tracks DoD funding lines and flags budgetary trends before they harden into requirements. It surfaces the acquisition and compliance regulations that apply, and - the part contractors quietly care about most - it names the government decision-makers worth calling.
The founding team describes itself, without much ceremony, as "a group of AI nerds." Reid runs the company. Oliver Gomez, who worked at Palantir and built military legal-review tools with large language models at Stanford, leads product. Joonghyun Lee, a commercial pilot with years of autonomous-aircraft research, handles the engineering. It is a strange, specific trio - a budget whisperer, a legal-AI builder, and a pilot - and that specificity is the point.
Reid is candid about why a 21-year-old feels welcome in national security at all. "Companies like SpaceX and Palantir set the tone for founders like me to take their chance in the defense industry," he told Inc. Magazine, which named him to its "Defense Tech's New Guard." A handful of firms, he argues, proved the sector was viable - and then went recruiting. "They can offer very incentivizing packages to kids, which is a door opener. Brings kids into an industry they might not have considered."
He is describing himself, of course. The door opened, and he walked through it, and then he started building doors for everyone behind him.
Usul's stated goal is not modest. Reid wants a global marketplace where governments can buy products quickly - starting with defense, then widening out. The company has already gone through Hacking for Defense, H4XLabs, and Y Combinator's Summer 2024 batch, raised a seed round of roughly $3.2-3.3 million led by Scout Ventures with defense insiders alongside, and won the Army's xTechIgnite competition with a private invitation for a Direct-to-Phase II SBIR - one of the military's fastest funding on-ramps. Next stops on the map: NATO and AUKUS markets.
The through-line is the same one that runs from the high-school company to the Stanford exit. Reid keeps finding slow, opaque systems and deciding they should be fast and legible instead. The federal budget is just the largest one he has found so far.
Companies like SpaceX and Palantir set the tone for founders like me to take their chance in the defense industry.— Jarren Reid, to Inc. Magazine
Usul indexes government demand across sectors. These bars are an illustrative read on the breadth Reid's platform maps - defense is the wedge, but the ambition runs wider.
“We're a group of AI nerds.”
ON THE FOUNDING TEAM“They can offer very incentivizing packages to kids, which is a door opener.”
ON HOW HE GOT IN“Set the tone for founders like me to take their chance.”
ON SPACEX & PALANTIRThe company's LinkedIn handle is "usulmafia" - a wink of sci-fi swagger for a firm named Usul, straight out of Dune.
Reid worked for multiple government contractors, including Palantir and MITRE, before most people his age had a full-time job.
He has walked out of two institutions mid-story - high school and Stanford - both times to go build.
One co-founder is a commercial pilot with years of autonomous-aircraft research. The founding team is an unusually specific trio.
The whole thing started as a classroom project - Stanford's Hacking for Defense - and turned into a YC company inside a year.