LegalTech startup Genie AI has announced it has raised a £1.2 million seed round and has won an £800K grant from UK Research and Innovation. The company’s intelligent contract editor, “SuperDrafter”, is currently piloting with law firms Clifford Chance, Pinsent Masons and Withers.
Genie AI aims to make knowledge more accessible to lawyers. Founded in 2017, Genie AI was part of Entrepreneur First’s 9th Cohort. Co-Founders Rafie Faruq and Nitish Mutha met when they specialised in deep learning and NLP during their Machine Learning MSc Degrees at UCL, taught in conjunction with Google Deepmind.
The start-up built its network whilst residing at Barclays’ Lawtech Eagle Lab in Notting Hill, launched in partnership with the Law Society and over a dozen law firms.
SuperDrafter assists lawyers with the collective intelligence of the firm. It reads thousands of past documents confidentially, then recommends clauses during contract drafting, negotiation and review. The result is a projected increase in drafting efficiency by 52 percent, according to a vote of 61 lawyers at a UK financial services firm after a product demo.
Rafie Faruq, CEO & Co-Founder of Genie AI, commented: “With my and Nitish’s MSc dissertations in deep generative algorithms and reinforcement learning, we realised we can not just extract, but actually recommend legal language specific to each matter.
“Lawyers always tell us they spend hours trawling through emails and file systems for that clause they wrote on that one deal; SuperDrafter shows this automatically. But it’s not just about efficiency. It’s about utilising the collective intelligence of the firm, and that means a superior client service for law firms, and better commercial outcomes for in-house teams.”
The £1.2m seed round is led by Connect Ventures. It is also backed by leading angel investors and advisors, including former President of the Supreme Court Lord Neuberger and Professor Jun Wang at UCL. The funds will be used to further test SuperDrafter, and will help develop the company’s second product, “Anonymiser”, which automatically redacts confidential information from contracts, complying with GDPR and preserving confidentiality.
Nitish Mutha, CTO & Co-Founder of Genie AI, added: “Our patent-pending technology solves some of the greatest challenges to large enterprise: we help firms control the confidentiality of their data whilst extracting novel insights.
“To present these insights, SuperDrafter might be the only contract editor to date that natively replicates Microsoft Word, enabling us to provide the familiarity of Word, powered with machine intelligence. SuperDrafter helps you draft your contracts with the collective intelligence of data, lawyers and algorithms.”