A UK-based contract platform which uses artificial intelligence (AI) to draft, edit and review agreements has secured £13.3m in its latest funding round.
Rafie Faruq, chief executive and co-founder of Genie AI, said the company, which currently employs no lawyers, would be using some of the new money to change that.
“Trust in AI platforms is a huge issue. They will focus on the quality of the AI outputs. A 60-page agreement, created in five minutes, has to be consistent, accurate and customised to the user’s needs.
“The real focus of Genie is now on quality, trust and security. It might not sound sexy but this is actually what lawyers want – AI that gives trustworthy results and recommendations.”
He said Genie had an advisory panel of legal experts, who were all senior in-house lawyers, and would recruit up to five lawyers.
Mr Faruq said Genie was “not targeting big law firms” as clients, and instead would concentrate mainly on in-house legal departments and small firms “more willing and able to try new technology” and which had “more flexibility around data security”.
He went on: “Big law firms are not willing to take measures to enable their data to be used by AI. The percentage of their revenue that they invest in AI is still quite low.”
Mr Faruq said around 70% of the new funding came from Google Ventures. Genie AI announced in July 2019 that it had secured £1.2m in seed funding to add to £800,000 received in the form of a government grant from UK Research and Innovation.
It says that over 100,000 companies in more than 120 jurisdictions around the world have used it to draft or review documents – 13% of them lawyers, law firms and in-house legal departments.
The platform did not charge for its services until three months ago, when three levels of annual subscription were introduced – at $320, $3,400 and $£11,000.
Mr Faruq did not give a figure for the number of subscribers but said the total grew by 39% last month. Over 30% of subscribers are law firms or in-house legal departments.
Mr Faruq said he expected staff numbers at Genie to more than double over the next six months, from 18 to around 40. The firm has a London office but staff work remotely.
He said some of the new funding would be used to develop further ‘agentic’ or more independent and autonomous AI, which the company was aiming to introduce as an update early next year.
He said Genie was “uniquely placed” to offer agentic AI for editing and customisation, because it had spent seven years building its own proprietary legal editor.
“The AI can now control the editor function and complete entire workflows, rather than just generating text.”
Vidu Shanmugarajah, partner at Google Ventures, added: “Genie is changing the way businesses all over the world transact. 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”.
Khosla Ventures, an early investor in OpenAI, also featured in the Series A funding round.
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