Ex-con's startup Commissary Club uses AI to help former prisoners

Richard Bronson has an unusual background for a startup founder: he spent time in prison. In the 1980s, Bronson worked for Stratton Oakmont, the brokerage firm run by Jordan Belfort — the “Wolf of Wall Street,” whose story became a 2013 film — before the firm collapsed in the mid-1990s amid misconduct accusations. Bronson left Stratton after a year to start his own brokerage firm in South Florida, building what he calls a $100 million business taking small-cap companies public. “Some of the success, however, came through breaking the law — securities laws — and ultimately, as I knew inevitably would happen, I had to pay the price,” Bronson told TechCrunch. “I lost everything, and most significantly, my freedom. And I was sent to federal prison for a couple of years.”

After his release, Bronson struggled to find work despite his education and experience. “Nobody would hire me … I was like completely radioactive,” he said. That experience shaped his new startup, Commissary Club — named for the prison store where inmates buy snacks and toiletries — an employment-focused social platform that uses AI to help people navigate finding jobs and housing after leaving prison. “I could not help but notice how little assistance was available to people coming out of prison,” Bronson said.

The platform also has a social component, which Bronson added because he knows how isolating life after prison can be. “It’s almost like Facebook,” he said, where users can find jobs, get help with housing and benefits, and also find community — and, per the site, a referral network and a way to find dates. Commissary Club is a team of two: Bronson and co-founder Roman Kissin, whom Bronson calls “the brains” behind the project. Kissin previously worked at eBay and IBM and served as CTO of LexisNexis between 2022 and 2025, according to his LinkedIn profile.

The site is free at first, then switches to paid: users get the first 10 applications free, then pay $149 for the next 10 or $14.99 each. Bronson acknowledges the for-profit model may be a tough sell for people just out of prison, but defends it as a sustainable way to serve an underserved market. “There’s a strong mission component, certainly,” he said. “I have devoted my life, when I came out of prison, to helping my brothers and sisters with records… But we’re going after a huge, huge market that nobody — I mean nobody — does anything about. People talk about AI taking away employment and people losing jobs. I look at it differently. We’re building AI that creates employment for people that society left behind.” Commissary Club was selected for TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield 200 pitch competition, part of TechCrunch Disrupt October 13–15 in San Francisco.

Why it matters

Commissary Club is testing whether AI-driven job-matching tools can be built specifically for a population — formerly incarcerated people — that mainstream hiring platforms largely overlook.