UK-based generative AI startup Robin AI has raised USD 10.5 million in a Series A funding round, it announced earlier this week. The funding round was led by finance-focused venture capital firm Plural, along with software-focused VC fund Episode 1, several angel investors, and senior executives from the legal and private equity sectors.
Robin AI aims to simplify the contract drafting process by automating contract management using a combination of software, machine learning, and expert human reviewers, notes the UK’s Scale Up Institute. It essentially set up a system where AI works alongside — rather than instead of — human lawyers. The AI system looks for particular elements in contract data that might need human review, and then human legal experts check and resolve any anomalies and issues that can’t be interpreted by the software.
Robin AI is investing a portion of the Series A funding in growing its tech team, CEO Richard Robinson noted in this week’s company statement. We can already see this happening, as the Robin AI Linkedin page shows heavy developer recruitment — mainly in the UK and US. And the funding has already allowed the company to acquire clients from Israel-based contract management software firm LawGeex, Robinson noted. This partial takeover of LawGeex client base saw Robin AI sign some pretty big names to its portfolio — including UBS, PWC, eBay and Pepsi.
About Robin AI
The startup has seen exponential growth since its 2019 founding by Robinson — with its revenue having increased 20x since its last fundraise, according to the CEO. It was already generating a profit before the Series A round, he added.
Robin AI’s software follows a software as a service (SaaS) model and has three main components —with AI being the main driver.
The first component of Robin AI is called Draft — which, as the name suggests, helps users draft their legal documents. It provides them with questionnaire-style templates in which they fill in data, producing the bare bones of a draft contract.
The second component, Review,is an AI-powered tool for document review. Robin AI developed this based on a machine learning model containing 4.5 million legal documents. The company claims that Review helps users to reduce the time spent on document review by almost 80%.
The third component, Query, appears to be a knowledge management tool. It allows users to store their valuable know-how in a central database equipped with an AI-powered search — meaning team members can easily find, compare and analyze the content they need.
Robin AI also recently announced that it’s integrating a product from US-based AI safety and research company Anthropic into its platform, tweaking the AI model of Anthropic’s Claude — a text-generating “rival to ChatGPT” — to meet the needs of the legal industry.
Authors’ note
This latest funding round represents a strong stimulus for legal tech, showing once again that investors believe in AI as having the power to transform the legal industry. Only time will tell if the adoption of such tools will spread across and beyond the borders of the most developed legal markets. As we’ve previously noted, AI-powered tools need to meet certain conditions for that to happen — crucially, by employing multilingual AI models.