Black-Owned ‘AI Lawyer’ Startup Secures $10.5M, Partners With OpenAI Rival
Black-owned startup Robin AI has raised $10.5 million to transform the legal industry with its AI-driven contract editor.
What is Robin AI?
Robin AI is the brainchild of former Clifford Chance lawyer Richard Robinson and former machine learning research scientist James Clough.
The startup trained its machine learning model on data from 4.5 million legal documents with input from in-house lawyers to create a ‘lawyer bot’ that can draft and edit legal contracts.
On average, users can draft and negotiate contracts up to 80% faster, saving up to 75% on legal fees.
Who has invested?
The funding round, led by Plural, saw participation from Episode 1 and several angel investors, including Monzo founder Tom Blomfield and senior executives across the legal and private equity industries.
“We have grown revenue 20x since our last fundraise and are already cash flow positive, reviewing over 12,000 contracts per year,” Robin AI CEO and founder Richard Robinson said in a statement on their website.
As part of the funding round, Robin AI has acquired a cohort of customers from LawGeex, whose customers include UBS, PWC, eBay and Pepsi.
Robin AI also plans to use the funding to expand its research and development, grow its 75-strong workforce and open a New York office, according to Sifted.
Partnership with OpenAI rival
Robin AI is the first legal sector partner for Anthropic, the Google-backed AI company that is developing a rival to OpenAI.
Anthropic is considered one of the world’s most promising startups developing large language models. Its own AI even managed to pass a law and economics exam, with answers “better than many human responses.”
“The team’s focus on AI safety aligns with our ‘lawyer-in-the-loop’ SaaS product – deliberately designed to manage the risk of even the most advanced models ‘hallucinating,'” he asserts.
“We’re using the best models in the world in our product, but we still need experienced human professionals to direct the software to achieve results that work for our customers.”
“Our product is already being used in big businesses where trust and accuracy are critical. We’re convinced our business model, using machine learning to help humans work faster, is the model that wins in this space.”
Through its partnership with Anthropic, Robin AI plans to launch a publicly available ‘self-serve’ version of its software.
This means anyone from individuals and small businesses to multinational corporations can process legal contracts at little to no cost.
