Robin AI raises $10.5m led by Plural to scale its unique ‘lawyer-in-the-loop’ AI model

London, New York, 27 February 2023: Robin AI, the generative AI startup, has raised $10.5m led by Plural, with participation from Episode 1. Other investors in the round include angel investor Tom Blomfield and senior executives across the legal and private equity industries from Bridgepoint, Apollo, Clifford Chance and Barings. Robin AI’s machine learning model is trained on proprietary data from 4.5 million legal documents, enabling users to draft and negotiate contracts 60-80% faster, saving up to 75% on legal fees. These savings are enabled by Robin’s unique “SaaS + services” business model, which combines a ‘lawyer-in-the-loop’ with the latest machine learning technology and the integration of the latest models from Anthropic.

Robin AI has grown revenue 20x since its last fundraise and is already cash flow positive, reviewing over 12,000 contracts per year. This latest round will drive further development of its tech team and has enabled the partial acquisition of competitor LawGeex, whose customers include UBS, PWC, Ebay and Pepsi. Robin AI is adding a cohort of these customers to its existing base of private equity and financial services clients including law firm Clifford Chance, and impact fund Blue Earth Capital.

Richard Robinson, founder and CEO of Robin AI, said: “There’s doubt that AI is exploding as a category. New technologies that push the boundaries of what is possible always bring questions of both safety and commercial viability. We believe that AI is bringing about an infrastructure-level change to modern software and our rapid traction in the legal market is testament to its potential.

We are very fortunate to be Anthropic’s launch partner for the legal sector – 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’. 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”.

Robin AI serves a diverse range of customers from large multinational corporations to SMEs and scale-ups. For example, its free self-serve software helps SMEs process contracts faster and at significantly lower cost – and bigger businesses can make use of more advanced features to edit high volume contracts efficiently, alongside specialist support from Robin’s 30 in-house lawyers.

Founded in 2019 by Richard Robinson, a former lawyer at Clifford Chance, and James Clough, a former machine learning research scientist at KCL and Imperial College, Robin AI has a team of 75 full-time employees, including legal professionals and software engineers. The Robin AI team is based in London, UK, but operates globally, with 75% of its revenue derived from the US.

Ian Hogarth, founding partner at Plural and co-author of The State of AI, said: “Repetitive legal work is a clear use case for large language models (LLMs) and Robin AI is the leading company to apply this rapidly advancing technology to contract generation and editing. Robin AI has successfully overcome the two major challenges in successfully applying LLMs to this problem: firstly, the high quality bar required for critical commercial legal documents and secondly, the amount of legal contract data required for GPT models to train on. The data problem hasn’t been solved elsewhere because contract data is typically private and offline. Richard and James, Robin AI’s co-founders, combine expertise in law and machine learning and succeeded in solving these challenges. They’ve built a huge proprietary dataset with over 7m data points of legal text, to fine tune Anthropic’s best in class LLM.”

Carina Namih, investor and Robin AI board member, said: “Robin has seen explosive growth over the last 18 months, with millions of contracts now flowing through their AI models. Robin delivers high quality results by combining these finely tuned models with a lawyer-in-the-loop. This focus on quality means we are now seeing clients using the system for more and more of their repetitive legal work. This is where AI is having a real impact today, freeing up teams and businesses to focus on their priorities.”

Robin AI is making its self-serve product publicly available, enabling startups and SMEs to process legal contracts at significantly lower cost. The web app can be accessed here.

In 2021, Robin AI secured $3 million in funding for its seed round. In addition to the funding round, Robin AI was also one of only 30 businesses to receive funding from the Google Black Founders Fund.