US contract drafting startup DraftWise has raised $5M led by EarlyBird with participation from strategic investors, including global law firm Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe.
Previous law firm investors include UK top 50 law firm Mishcon de Reya, which runs legal tech incubator MDR Lab. DraftWise graduated from Y Combinator in September 2020 before joining MDR LAB’s Improve programme in December 2020. Mishcon entered a commercial agreement with DraftWise in 2021, investing in its seed round later that same year. Orrick signed a multi-year commercial agreement with DraftWise in 2022.
DraftWise helps attorneys to draft and review contracts faster through its platform directly in Microsoft Word. It integrates with document management systems and other knowledge management resources.
In a blog post out today announcing its funding. DraftWise said: “Three years ago, we set out to build an Iron Man suit for lawyers, powered by a law firm’s collective data and expertise. From the beginning, we recognized that AI and LLMs have a long way to go to solve everything we want them to do – but as we experienced firsthand at Palantir, we can overcome those limits using strong data engineering fundamentals.
“We started by meticulously building clean datasets, designing data ontologies to facilitate attorney workflows, and capturing the outcomes of attorney decision-making. Today, DraftWise is the only AI platform securely applying private LLM to law firm data.
“Our next-generation AI platform stands on the shoulders of our prior work: the difficult and seemingly unrewarding prerequisites, the investment in privacy and security, and the thoughtful feedback shared by our earliest users – attorneys at firms like Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP, Katten Muchin Rosenman LLP, Womble Bond Dickinson (US) LLP, Gunderson Dettmer LLP, and Mishcon de Reya LLP.”
With this influx of new capital, Draftwise says that it is doubling down on its generative AI platform to provide even more firms with the secure AI tools they need to deliver better client outcomes, commenting: “We’ve spent three years setting the stage for secure, trustworthy AI systems, and our ambitions have only grown from the support and feedback shown by existing customers. We’ve got a lot of exciting work ahead of us, and we promise to keep you updated with what we’re doing and why it matters.”