The new year has started off with good news for the Legal Tech Funding Market: as demand for generative AI in the legal sector explodes, Robin AI, the AI-powered legal copilot, has announced that it has raised $26 million in new funding. The Series B round is led by Temasek, a global investment company headquartered in Singapore. Other investors include QuantumLight, Plural and AFG Partners.
Robin AI was founded in 2019 by Richard Robinson, a lawyer at Clifford Chance, and James Clough, a machine learning research scientist at Imperial College. It leverages the power of generative AI to automate and speed up the process of drafting and negotiating contracts, as well as extracting information from across entire contract repositories through simple search. Its legal copilot, available as a Microsoft Word add-in, can cut the time it takes to review contracts by 85%, allowing businesses’ legal teams to move faster, save money and ultimately invest their time more strategically.
Robin AI places quality and accuracy at the heart of its approach. Earlier this year, it became one of Anthropic’s launch partners for the release of their Large Language Model (LLM), Claude – the only such partner applying this technology to legal work. Claude 2.1 allows much longer prompts than other LLMs (around 150,000 words in each prompt), a key benefit for analysing long and complex legal documents. Anthropic is also dedicated to building frontier AI models that are safe and reliable.
Robin AI operates a hybrid model that combines the Claude LLM with its own proprietary contract data (from over 2 million contracts) and machine learning techniques to read and understand contracts. An in-house team of legal professionals, or lawyers-in-the-loop, helps to further refine the model to ensure the highest levels of quality and accuracy.
Robin AI has seen significant traction for its contract copilot with customers increasing by 4x in the past year and revenues by 5x. It has seen especially strong demand from the private equity sector where speed is critical to deal closures and where the tracking of obligations to investors can be complex. Robin AI customers include Pepsico, PwC, Yum! Brands, AlbaCore Capital Group, and BlueEarth Capital.
CEO and co-founder Richard Robinson, who has relocated to New York to support the US expansion, said: “We’ve seen incredible customer traction with what we believe is the smartest AI contract copilot on the market. But this is just the beginning. We are building the AI platform for the legal sector – a service that deeply understands every aspect of the legal function, from drafting contracts, researching case law to explaining legal concepts – our AI will help people tackle every legal task. This will help level the playing field between big and small law firms and help more people access legal services. This investment will help us to realise this vision.”
Carina Namih, Partner at Plural, said, “Everyone is wondering how AI lands usefully. Robin is delivering AI products to an astonishing volume and range of customers – serious businesses across sectors that are using it today to transform how they work. And they’ve only scratched the surface. I have backed this team since inception and couldn’t be more bullish about their ability to win the global legal market.”
Ilya Kondrashov, CEO at QuantumLight, said, “Robin AI has built a great team and product and have developed an impressive record of acquiring major enterprise accounts in a short period of time. As an AI-driven VC firm, we immediately saw the potential of Robin AI’s system to drive tremendous efficiency in the field of legal services. We are extremely grateful for the opportunity to come along with Richard, James and the wider team at Robin AI on their exciting journey to realise the potential of AI and build one of the most significant companies in the AI applications space.”
Ivan Ong, Partner at AFG Partners, said, “Robin AI is addressing a central issue in the legal industry, and in a short time has positioned itself as a market leader in a space that has significant growth potential. As a global fund backed by investors from financial services, we believe that there should be a better way to manage the growing number of legal contracts between stakeholders. Robin AI is highly applicable across our network of investors and ecosystem partners and we look forward to scaling the company deeper into Asia and globally. We are pleased to join Temasek and other seasoned investors as we support Robin AI on its growth journey.”
The funding will allow Robin AI to capitalise on the strong momentum it is seeing in a very fast moving market. This includes expanding its team on the ground in the US where three quarters of its revenue is already derived from; as well as opening an office in Singapore to expand into Asia Pacific. The investment will also be used to expand its existing team of AI and machine learning experts.
