Chetan Puttagunta of Benchmark, who is also joining the board, led a $10.5 million Seed round for Leya, a startup that was only established last year. SV Angel, Y-Combinator, and Hummingbird have also made investments 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.’
It’s also important to note that Junestrand worked at McKinsey, venture capital, two other Y Combinator firms, and Ericsson and Abios (which Kambi later acquired) as a software developer before joining Leya. So that’s beneficial.
So just what does it accomplish? What they say is this: Leya’s AI-powered legal assistant uses the company’s own data and well-cited public legal sources to offer reliable responses, speed up conversations, facilitate due diligence reviews, modify documents, and enhance results. With the help of legal data from more than 15 jurisdictions, the Swedish company’s software can access a firm’s files and papers straight from its DMS and provide “sentence-level citations and references to the underlying material in its output.”
Even while it might be useful, law firms (and corporates) will understandably exercise caution when granting access to their DMS, at least until they are absolutely positive about where all the data flows or which data Leya can view.
According to the firm, the three main ideas underlying its offering are as follows:Knowledge: Work, policies, and templates from the depths of the customer’s organization are surfaced by the AI-powered legal assistant. Increasing Productivity: Enables legal practitioners to conduct more thorough research, quickly proofread, and take into account a variety of AI-intel aspects. Increasing Results: Attorneys can spend more time providing value to clients by assigning laborious duties to Leya.
More than 70 prestigious law firms in Europe presently utilize it, and they have aspirations to grow to the US in the future, which the investment would undoubtedly facilitate.
All things considered, this is yet another encouraging legal technology tale from Europe, where a wave of genAI-inspired firms are emerging.
