Genie AI, the world’s leading AI legal editor, has raised €16 million in Series A funding, led by GV (Google Ventures), and joined by Khosla Ventures (early investors in OpenAI), taking its total raised to over €18 million. Previous to this round, Genie AI received one of the UK Government’s largest grants for a startup, and seed funding led by Connect Ventures.
Unlike other Large Language Models (LLMs) Genie drafts entirely personalised, professionally formatted and comprehensive 50+ page agreements across all major global jurisdictions, within minutes, when it used to take weeks. Genie also has an open-source library of templates.
Users can upload their own documents, use a template or review their generated contract using Genie’s risk review, which detects issues in documents, explains them, and suggests changes. Importantly, Genie improves safety by working with leading universities on data privacy, security and sovereignty; and legal accuracy too, with lawyers rating the tool as 94% accurate.
The investment follows exponential growth for Genie and projections for the legal AI software industry to grow to $5 billion by 2030. To date, over 100,000 companies have drafted or reviewed documents on Genie, including 11 FTSE100 companies, 20 Global200 law firms, a number of top US banks, and two of the ‘big four’ UK supermarket chains. Contracts have been drafted in 120+ jurisdictions including the UK, California, Texas, India, Australia, South Africa, Singapore, France, and Germany.
The company was founded by Rafie Faruq and Nitish Mutha who specialised in generative AI while taught at UCL by leading researchers at Google DeepMind. They recognised the opportunity for AI in reducing the time spent on tasks that involve language processing, data analysis and decision making – all prevalent in contract drafting, and developed the most advanced AI legal drafter in the market.
Lawyers can get to 80% done in 5 minutes when drafting or reviewing documents on Genie, saving an average of 5 hours per week, or £72,800 per year per lawyer. Legal practitioners can turn their documents around in minutes, enabling them to be part of the solution for their clients and businesses, not the blocker – aiding job satisfaction, given that two thirds of legal professionals have experienced burnout.
With Rafie also an economist, the two also recognized that contracts are the cornerstone of business transactions. With PwC estimating that an average Fortune 2000 company now maintains 20,000-40,000 active contracts at any time, they developed Genie AI to reduce legal friction and enhance global economic efficiency.
“Lawyers are seen by many as the ‘no’ people,” commented Rafie Faruq, Cofounder and CEO at Genie AI. “Genie is the most risk-aware way to draft today, giving lawyers that extra layer of comfort. The faster we can mitigate the risk, the faster we can turn around documents – and Genie’s AI drafter has a seven year head start to help them do this.”
“Genie is changing the way businesses all over the world transact,” commented Vidu Shanmugarajah, Partner at GV. “By combining AI with a feature rich editor, Genie allows users to work with contracts in a way that was not possible before. We’re impressed with Genie AI’s early customer traction and product-led growth, and are excited to support them on the journey ahead.”
“AI is already rapidly transforming industries and legal is one of the areas that will benefit from this technology,” added Kanu Gulati, Partner at Khosla Ventures. “Genie AI’s technology, progress to date and vision going forward made this a compelling investment for us.”
Beyond the funding raised to date, the company has also seen the professional backing of figures in both the machine learning and legal communities; Professor Jun Wang, World Leader in generative algorithms and reinforcement learning for NLP, and Lord Neuberger, Former President of Supreme Court UK.
Read the orginal article: https://www.eu-startups.com/2024/10/london-based-genie-ai-raises-e16-million-to-reduce-legal-friction-and-boost-economic-efficiency/
