A startup founder who served time in prison is looking to court an untapped market: ex-cons

Richard Bronson, an entrepreneur who recently launched a startup called Commissary Club, has an unusual background for a founder: in a previous life, he spent time in prison.

In the 1980s, Bronson worked for the notorious Stratton Oakmont — the corruption-riddled brokerage firm that was run by Jordan Belfort, the so-called “Wolf of Wall Street” whose story became a 2013 film. The firm collapsed in the mid-1990s under the weight of misconduct accusations.

Bronson was a partner at Stratton, but left after a year to start his own firm in South Florida. He was quite successful in that venture, until he wasn’t.

“I built a $100 million business taking these small cap companies public,” Bronson told TechCrunch. “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. I lost everything, and most significantly, my freedom. And I was sent to federal prison for a couple of years.”

Bronson has been out of prison for a long time now, but he has never forgotten the struggles he had when he initially emerged from prison.

“Nobody would hire me, despite all of my education and work experience and everything else. I was like completely radioactive,” he said.

Bronson’s experience after prison helped inform his current startup, an employment-focused social media platform called Commissary Club, which takes its name from the store inside a prison where inmates buy snacks and toiletries. The site is specifically marketed to ex-cons, and uses AI to help them navigate the often confusing process of finding employment and housing after they reenter the world.

“I could not help but notice how little assistance was available to people coming out of prison,” said Bronson. “If it was this bad for me, what about the guys I was in prison with who had very little education and very little job experience? What were their chances?”

Commissary Club also has a social component, which Bronson said he added because he knows how isolating the post-prison experience can be. “It’s almost like Facebook,” he said, “where people can not only find job, and get the help with the jobs and the housing and access to benefits, but they find the other missing ingredient that’s existentially important to them that isn’t satisfied elsewhere. They find community.” Judging by the site, Commissary Club also appears primed to become a referral network, and it offers a way for users to find dates.

For now, Bronson’s startup is a team of two — just him and his co-founder, Roman Kissin, who Bronson called the technical mind (or “the brains”) behind the project. Kissin previously worked for eBay and IBM and, between 2022 and 2025, served as the CTO of LexisNexis, according to his LinkedIn profile.

The site is free at first, then switches to paid. Users get “the first 10 applications for free, and then we bundle the next at $149 for 10 applications, or $14.99 each,” Bronson told TechCrunch. Some may balk at that for-profit model, and for people just out of prison, it may be a tough sell.

Yet Bronson sees it as a win-win — a business that can help a community that few others are trying to help.

“People immediately assume, ‘Oh, is this a nonprofit?’ And the answer is no,” said Bronson. There’s a strong mission component, certainly,” he continued,” and I have devoted my life, when I came out of prison, to helping my brothers and sisters with records. Part of it is because I just felt so remorseful for the shit that I had done. I still wake up every day regretting choices I made.

“But we’re going after a huge, huge market that nobody — I mean nobody — does anything about,” said Bronson. “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.”

Bronson’s Commissary Club was selected for this year’s TechCrunch Startup Battlefield 200, as part of TechCrunch’s storied Battlefield Competition; come join us next week in San Francisco to see the competition live.