Ex-DOJ Antitrust Chief Raises $6.4M to Sell AI to Big Tech's Opponents

FluxCap, the startup co-founded by former Justice Department antitrust chief Jonathan Kanter, launched Oct. 28 with $6.4 million in seed funding to sell AI case-building tools to plaintiffs suing large technology companies. The round includes Burford Capital, Y Combinator, Bloomberg Beta, Deep Work Capital, Coalition Operators and Omidyar Network. Antitrust boutique Kressin Powers is already a customer.

Kanter ran the DOJ's Antitrust Division until 2024. His co-founder, Doha Mekki, served as the division's former acting chief, and the team mixes former DOJ staff with an engineering group led by CTO Marshall Seid, staffed heavily with Palantir alumni. That combination reads less like a legal-tech outfit and more like an intelligence operation pointed at courtrooms.

Kanter disclosed the venture in an interview with The Verge published Monday. The company starts with antitrust work and plans to expand into other practice areas.

What does the platform actually do?

FluxCap combines proprietary technology with existing large language models. The company says three engines cover the facts, law and strategy of a case, supporting work from research and evidence analysis through complaint drafting, discovery and deposition preparation.

The hard part, Kanter said, was teaching the system to find evidence inside discovery files. Executives rarely describe themselves as monopolists; context gives ordinary messages their meaning. General legal AI tools such as ChatGPT and Harvey, in his words, "do okay" but "miss the nuance."

He offered one concrete measure of the tool's value: it gives a small team the capacity of roughly "20-plus people working around the clock." That is the pitch in one line — leverage, priced below a litigation department.

FluxCap is also in talks with public and private enforcers, Kanter said, alongside its plaintiff-side customers. The company has not named those enforcers, and no agreements are confirmed.

Why the resource gap matters

The commercial logic rests on a funding asymmetry. Congress appropriated $245 million for the entire Antitrust Division in fiscal 2026, a division with more than 400 attorneys across all of its work. Under the Biden administration, that division tried Google twice and sued Apple and Live Nation for monopolization.

State attorneys general, who pressed antitrust cases as the Trump DOJ pulled back, have thinner benches still. "A large state AG might have 10 people working on a case," Kanter said. Ten lawyers against the litigation budgets of the largest technology firms is not a contest; it is a scheduling problem.

Kanter does not claim software fixes this. "Government is always going to be outmatched, and they desperately need more funding, and desperately need more budget, and more headcount," he said. The tool widens the door for private plaintiffs first; the public sector remains a negotiation.

Where this leads

The seed round is modest by AI-market standards, but the buyer list tells the story. Litigation funders such as Burford measure returns on case outcomes, and they do not fund tooling that fails to move dockets. If FluxCap's engines compress discovery work the way its founders claim, every well-funded plaintiff firm facing a large technology defendant becomes a prospect — and the cost of mounting an antitrust suit drops accordingly. Kanter and Mekki spent years building cases against those defendants with public resources; they will now try to industrialize the same work for private ones.