Legaltech startup Definely has raised a $7m Series A to develop its AI-powered software that aims to help lawyers understand and edit documents.
The round was led by Octopus Ventures, with participation from Cornerstone VC and Zrosk Investment Ltd, alongside a number of angels. The startup previously raised $4.5m from investors including Google and Microsoft.
Definely plans to use the money to build out more AI-based products and double down on expanding its US operations.
The round comes following a string of sizable raises from startups in the legal tech sector, with companies trying to outcompete each other to deploy AI to streamline laborious processes like drafting and reviewing documents.
The legaltech space is a “race at the moment”, says Nnamdi Emelifeonwu, CEO and cofounder. “There will be winners and losers. The startup that leverages AI in a meaningful way to customers will be the winners.”
US expansion
Founded in 2020, Definely offers a suite of products that currently include an AI-powered drafting tool, proofreader and a PDF scanner — which helps lawyers cross-reference information across different formats of document. It’s all delivered as a plugin for Microsoft Word.
Definely is sold as a subscription model, to individuals lawyers and enterprises. Depending on the package, it typically costs individuals £75-90 a month.
The company tells Sifted it has 40k active users from companies and law firms across the UK, Europe, US, Canada and Australia. That includes lawyers from companies including Slaughter & May, Dentons, Deloitte and P&O Cruises.
While most of its revenue comes from the UK and Europe at the moment, the startup has eyes firmly on the US market — where it currently gets 30% of its revenue from, says Emelifeonwu.
“The US legal market is about 10 times the size of the UK’s”, he tells Sifted — pointing to the 205k registered solicitors in the UK versus 1.3m in the US. “The US will play a lot more importance as we grow.”
The rise of AI legaltech
While expanding to the US market is one of the key areas that fresh funding will be spent on — the other is building out more products using AI.
Because “law is a linguistic-based profession”, the potential for using language-based technology like generative AI to increase efficiency is huge, says Emelifeonwu’s cofounder Feargus MacDaeid.
While they’re keeping schtum about specific plans around their AI legaltech product roadmap (a sign of how competitive this space is at the moment), Definely is looking into using natural language processing and generative AI to help link queries across multiple documents, Emelifeonwu and MacDaeid say.
Definely’s also just begun using one of French GenAI startup Mistral’s models to train its software to answer queries and handle documents in multiple languages, says MacDaeid. “Mistral have trained their model on a corpora of six European languages, so they’re incredibly well placed to provide that kind of information.”
But the startup is up against some stiff — and increasingly well-funded — competition in Europe’s AI legaltech space.
Last month, Luminance raised $40m and in January RobinAI raised £20.6m from investors including Temasek, Plural and Revolut Nik Storonsky’s family office QuantumLight.
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/microsoft-google-ai-legaltech-startup-news/
