Jonathan Kanter, the former head of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division, has launched a tech startup called FluxCap with Doha Mekki, the division’s former acting chief. The company is selling an AI-based legal research and analysis tool aimed at helping plaintiffs build cases against large, well-resourced companies. FluxCap is starting with a focus on antitrust matters but intends to expand into other areas of legal practice.
The startup’s team includes former DOJ staffers and former Palantir engineers. Its platform combines proprietary technology with existing large language models and is designed primarily for research and analysis. According to the company, the system identifies the facts and legal framework that determine whether a case succeeds and looks for weaknesses in attorneys’ reasoning. It can also sort through large volumes of discovery materials to find signals of anticompetitive conduct.
Kanter described the venture as a way to extend the reach of enforcement teams with limited resources, calling it necessary for enforcement to work over the long term. He said getting the tool to recognize relevant evidence was among the hardest tasks, because executives rarely describe themselves as monopolists and intent often emerges from context. The team of former government lawyers spent months testing the system on existing and hypothetical cases, and Kanter said legal reasoning is difficult for basic legal tools because it turns on persuasion rather than right or wrong answers.
Antitrust boutique firm Kressin Powers is among FluxCap’s first customers, and Kanter said the company is in talks with both public and private enforcers. He said the tool gives a small team the capacity of roughly 20-plus people working around the clock. The idea grew out of Kanter’s time at the Antitrust Division, where he and his colleagues tried to stretch limited resources with technology. During the Biden administration, the DOJ took Google to trial twice and filed monopolization suits against Apple and Live Nation, among other actions.
The division’s resources are small compared with those of the companies it investigates. Congress appropriated $245 million to the Antitrust Division for fiscal year 2026, and it has more than 400 attorneys across several issue areas. Kanter said the imbalance is even greater for state attorneys general, who have pursued antitrust action as the Trump administration has held back; state AGs won a case against Live Nation that the DOJ settled, and they sued to block the Paramount-Warner Media merger before settling after the DOJ declined. Kanter said a large state AG might have 10 people on a case.
While at the DOJ, Kanter and others tested AI-based legal tools and found them insufficient for complex research, saying they missed nuance. The division secured a $45.5 million grant from the government’s Tech Modernization Fund for better case management and evidence review tools, which Kanter said his team never had the chance to deploy before leaving office. He said government enforcers will always be outmatched and need more funding, budget and headcount, and that private defendants will likely outweigh anything the government can produce.
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