Legal tech startup Leya, which was only founded last year, has raised $10.5m in a Seed round led by Benchmark’s Chetan Puttagunta, who is also joining the board. Hummingbird, SV Angel and Y-Combinator also invested in the genAI multi-feature legal assistant.
In a statement to Artificial Lawyer, Max Junestrand, CEO and co-founder, said: ‘Leya was built on the belief that the legal profession should evolve with technology, not be weighed down by it.
‘By tapping into your own data repository and well-cited legal sources, Leya unlocks valuable knowledge, increases productivity, and ultimately improves outcomes for legal professionals. With our Seed funding, we are planning to expand our product to support even more customers.’
And it’s worth mentioning that prior to Leya, Junestrand was involved with two other Y Combinator startups, worked at McKinsey, engaged in venture capital, and served as a software developer at Abios (acquired by Kambi) and Ericsson. So, that helps.
But what does it do exactly? Here’s what they say: Leya’s AI-powered legal assistant delivers trustworthy answers by leveraging well-cited public legal sources and the firm’s proprietary data to streamline conversations, enable due-diligence reviews and document editing and improve outcomes.
The Swedish company’s product can access a firm’s files and documents directly from their DMS and combine them with legal information from 15-plus jurisdictions to provide ‘sentence-level citations and references to the underlying material in its output’.
Of course, law firms (and corporates) will naturally tread carefully with regard to giving access to their DMS, even if it may be helpful….at least until they are super-certain of where all the data goes or which data can be viewed by Leya.
The company explains that its offering revolves around three core concepts:
- ‘Knowledge: the AI-powered legal assistant surfaces work, policies, and templates from the depths of customers organisation
- Increasing Productivity: Allows legal professionals to dig deeper into research, proof-read in a moment and consider multiple factors from AI-intel.
- Improving Outcomes: By outsourcing tedious tasks to Leya, legal professionals can spend time on creating value for clients.’
It is currently being used by more than 70 top law firms in Europe, with plans to expand to the US in the future – which the investment will certainly help with.
Overall, another positive legal tech story coming out of Europe, where there have been a spate of genAI-inspired startups coming into existence.
What does this all mean? It’s more competition for incumbents in several overlapping spaces – as if they needed any more. It’s also proof that Europe is having a seriously creative wave of legal tech activity, and that it seems to be driven by the ease with which LLM technology can be leveraged.
And, we are also seeing – as in this case – more startups offering a range of features all in one go, or at least very soon after launch. Back in the old days, a startup might begin with one feature and then add another some years later. Now, they seem to bounce into the world with multiple, interconnected capabilities all at once. But again, that’s the power of LLMs for you. They are multi-directional. Wherever there is text, there is the potential to build a solution.
Congrats to Leya. Nice to see a Scandinavian startup doing well too!
