By Louis Goss
A City computing company has raised $10.5m (£8.8m) from backers including Magic Circle law firm Clifford Chance to develop an artificial intelligence (AI) driven, robot lawyer.
The founders of fintech firms Monzo and Wise have also thrown their weight behind London’s Robin AI, which is seeking to disrupt the legal sector with its AI technology.
Robin AI, which uses AI to generate legal documents, said it had bagged $10.5m funding in a round led by Plural, the venture capital firm founded by Wise co-founder Taavet Hinrikus.
Monzo founder Tom Blomfield has also backed the round as an angel investor, alongside senior chiefs from private equity firms Bridgepoint and Apollo, and law firm Clifford Chance, an existing client of the company.
Robin AI was founded by ex-Clifford Chance lawyer Richard Robinson and machine learning researcher James Clough in 2019. The software developer now employs 75 full time staff in developing its AI products.
Bosses at Robin AI said the cash would now be channelled into boosting the development of its tech team and allow it to snap up a stake in competitor LawGeex, whose customers include UBS, PWC, Ebay and Pepsi.
The fundraise comes amid a wave of investor interest in artificial intelligence, after AI-powered chat software Chat GPT sent shockwaves across the tech sector following its launch late last year.
Chat GPT’s has since fuelled a race to commercialise AI technologies, with Google quickly rolling out a competitor product, Bard, earlier this month.
“There’s doubt that AI is exploding as a category,” Robin AI’s founder, Richard Robinson, said.
“New technologies that push the boundaries of what is possible always bring questions of both safety and commercial viability.”
“We believe that AI is bringing about an infrastructure-level change to modern software and our rapid traction in the legal market is testament to its potential.”
Robin AI says its machine learning model allows users to draft and negotiate contracts 60-80 per cent faster while saving up to 75 per cent on legal fees, as well as keeping a “lawyer-in-the-loop” throughout the process.
The firm said it already counts a host of large “multinational corporations” as well as SMEs and scale-ups among its customer base and has seen revenue grow over 20 times in the past year.
Ian Hogarth, founding partner at Plural, said “repetitive legal work” was a “clear use case” artificial intelligence and ‘large language models’, but Robin AI was clearing a number of obstacles that had so far hampered widespread adoption.
“Richard and James, Robin AI’s co-founders, combine expertise in law and machine learning and succeeded in solving these challenges,” he said.
“They’ve built a huge proprietary dataset with over 7m data points of legal text, to fine tune Anthropic’s best in class LLM.”
Carina Namih, investor and Robin AI board member, said: “Robin has seen explosive growth over the last 18 months, with millions of contracts now flowing through their AI models.”
“Robin delivers high quality results by combining these finely tuned models with a lawyer-in-the-loop. This focus on quality means we are now seeing clients using the system for more and more of their repetitive legal work.”
“This is where AI is having a real impact today, freeing up teams and businesses to focus on their priorities.”
Robin AI is making its self-serve product publicly available, enabling startups and SMEs to process legal contracts at significantly lower cost. The web app can be accessed here.
In 2021, Robin AI secured $3 million in funding for its seed round. In addition to the funding round, Robin AI was also one of only 30 businesses to receive funding from the Google Black Founders Fund.
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