Belgium-founded AI contract review startup LegalFly has raised over €2m seed funding in a round led by Swiss venture capital firm Redalpine, with participation from Mehdi Ghissassi, director of product at Google DeepMind.
LegalFly, which won runner up in the ‘Legal AI Supplier of the Year’ category at the British Legal Technology Awards last week, was founded in early 2023 by four Tinder technology veterans. It leverages large language models including OpenAI’s GPT; Meta’s LLaMA and Google’s BERT and according to CEO and founder Ruben Miessen, is LLM agnostic.
The product first company engaged with around 25 law firms to build its beta product, with Miessen telling Legal IT Insider: “We quickly started building a legal community around legal AI events with partners to understand their needs and pains. We shipped multiple iterations to 25 firms in beta using short feedback loops.”
According to Miessen, this method is more effective than hiring people with legal expertise – and potentially bias – to work within the company.
Since launching its beta version in June, LegalFly says that it has been rapidly onboarding dozens of leading industry law firms and corporations in the United Kingdom, France and Benelux, and has two 2,000+ law firm customers. The seed investment will help it to accelerate its growth to meet the “overwhelming demand”, evident by the waiting list of over 100 law firms and corporations. It will also help it to expand its business operations to the United States.
While LegalFly, which calls itself the ‘AI Copilot for legal teams’, started out in contract review, it is branching into drafting and also litigation use cases.
Sebastian Becker, general partner at Redalpine and newly appointed board member, said: “The exceptional technical team at LegalFly has created a standout product leading to exceptional usage among its customers. This, combined with their highly effective go-to-market strategy, makes LegalFly perfectly positioned to lead the way in the fast-moving legal sector.”
Legalfly says that existing customers are reporting a 60% reduction in contract review & drafting time.