Embarking on a journey to revolutionize the legal tech landscape, Y Combinator’s post-pandemic cohorts have seen a rise in legal tech start-ups. With this list, dive into YC’s bold vision as startups redefine the legal landscape.
Hidden Hand (S23 COHORT)
Founded by Bennet Cohen, in 2023, Hidden Hand is a San Fransico based AI powered client intake software for law firms. For boutique law firms, Hidden Hand employs AI to cut client intake time by 30% so that they may concentrate on providing sincere, meaningful advocacy for each of their clients. It combines the most effective features of both human-led and automated intake to increase efficiency without sacrificing service.
Casehopper (S23 COHORT)
Casehopper is a Seattle based AI assisted drafting tool for Immigration Lawyers. It rapidly produces immigration applications by fusing customer intake forms with large language models. It is co-founded by Anuhya Vajpei and Juan M Ochoa Ortiz.
Docsum (S23 COHORT)
Founded by Shaunak Turaga and Alex Leonov, Docsum is an AI contract reviewer for sales teams. Lawyers can rapidly evaluate and negotiate contracts with their sales team with Docsum. It is headquatered at San Francisco.
Atla (S23 COHORT)
Atla makes it simple for in-house attorneys to respond to legal inquiries for their companies. It achieves this by condensing tens of thousands of pages of legalese, enabling consumers to ask follow-up questions, and producing accurate responses. It was founded by Roman Engeler and Maurice Burger in 2023 in London, England.
AiSDR (S23 COHORT)
Founded by Yuriy Zaremba and Oleg Zaremba, AiSDR is developing an AI-powered sales automation platform, to enable businesses to automatically qualify inbound leads, generate and send out targeted email campaigns, and communicate with their prospects with the aim of scheduling a sales appointment. It is headquatered at San Francisco.
Affinity (S23 COHORT)
Affinity is a platform for compliance training made especially for sectors with strict regulations. They previously started and successfully exited a fintech company, and they are now using that experience to address the learning management requirements of regulated digital organizations, ranging from large corporate banks to development stage startups. The founders are Faraz Rana and Peter Greczner. It was founded in 2023 in New York.
Greenlite (S23 COHORT)
Greenlite was founded in 2023 in San Francisco by Alex Jin and Will Lawrence. It creates AI agents for pursuing financial wrongdoing. Greenlite agents are used by banks and fintech companies to automate processes including regulatory reporting, entity due diligence, and investigating suspicious activities.
Kula (W22 COHORT)
Founded in 2022 by Nelson Jones and Saaras Mehan, Kula is a London bases AI Business Development team for Law firms.
UpLink (S22 COHORT)
Document collection software for lawyers, accountants and auditors. It was founded by Alex Maher, Nick Yarmesch, Brady Ochse, and Alex Grant in 2022. It is headquatered at Washington DC.
Hadrius (W23 COHORT)
Hadrius uses AI to fully automate the ongoing SEC compliance process for financial firms. It was founded in 2021 by Thomas Stewart, and Allen Calderwood. Hadrius is headquartered at New York.
FinFlx (W22 COHORT)
SME can now offer defined contribution pension plans in compliance with local labor rules more easily and affordably thanks to FinFlx. With entirely digital employee record management, plan administration, investment selection, and extensive reporting, employers may create a pension plan in hours as opposed to weeks. FinFlx was founded in Dubai by Amr Ussif and Matthieu Capelle.
Axis (W22 COHORT)
Axis is a knowledge repository of governmental rules and representatives that aids big businesses in conducting business overseas. Its software, for instance, will inform you of the regulations you must follow and the authorities you require permission from if you wish to conduct business in Saudi Arabia. It was founded in 2018 by Mishaal Al Gregawi and Alenjandro Vidal Rodriguez. It is headquatered at New York.
Legistify (W22 COHORT)
Legistify offers complete software that makes it easier for businesses to manage their legal affairs. Building in India while pursuing a $36 billion or more worldwide opportunity. Legistify is an Indian company founded in 2016 by Akshat Singhal and Prateek Mohapatra.
Type (W23 COHORT)
Type was founded in 2022 by Stew Fortier and Stefan Li. With Type, marketers and content creators can write excellent content rapidly. Type is an AI-first document editor. Individuals and teams can use Type to immediately make drafts, rework content, and propose what to develop next rather than authoring critical information from start.
Waveline (W23 COHORT)
Waveline automates document processing pipelines by utilizing AI while still employing conventional techniques. Waveline is a Switzerland based software founded in 2022 by Jan Schnyder, Nicolas Muntwyler, Kyrill Hux and Stan Wohlwend.
AvenHQ (W23 COHORT)
AvenHQ is a one-stop shop for professional service companies to launch, manage, and expand their operations.It was founded in 2023 by Fatma Akcay and Eamonn Gahan.
Darrow (W21 COHORT)
Darrow is an AI powered legaltech company founded in New York in 2020 by Evyatar Ben Artzi and Gila Hayat. It uses AI to discover undetected legal violations such privacy breaches, defective medications, cancer-causing air pollution, etc. It is an ML-powered justice intelligence platform.
Panadata (S20 COHORT)
Panadata is a legal tech company founded in Panama in 2017. It runs background checks on businesses using data from public records in Panama. It is trusted locally by largest banks, law enforcement agencies, law firms and banking regulations. It was founded by Ivan Barria.
Keynua (W19 COHORT)
Keynua is an E-sign platform that makes use of brief video signatures to authorize specific documents and show the signer’s visual identification, which is afterwards verified using public records and social media accounts. It was founded in 2019 by Alfredo Granda, Manuel Olguin, Luis Alban, Inma Canadas.
Spire Law (W19 COHORT)
The batch for the winter of 2019 included Spire Tech Services. In court, Spire Law represents companies and company owners. The marketing and technological development for Spire Law are supported by Spire Tech Services. It was founded by Kyle Harris and Jesse Unruh.
Kodex (S21 COHORT)
Kodex makes it simple for businesses to process and respond to subpoenas from international governments. Without Kodex, businesses would mostly rely on email, fax, and spreadsheets to manage user data from clients like Coinbase and thousands of other enterprises. With the use of the SaaS solution Kodex, private sector businesses may better control their interactions, processes, and secure file transfers with governmental organizations who are requesting sensitive data about their customers.
Marqvision (S21 COHORT)
Global brands and marketplaces can manage all of their IP operations, including creating, administering, protecting, and licensing IPs, on one centralized platform thanks to the work of Marqvision. They assist brands in removing fake products from 1,500 online marketplaces throughout the world using IP protection. With IP creation, they assist brands in quickly registering trademarks in 120 nations. MarqVision was founded by Harvard Law students and received funding from Softbank, DST Global, and Y Combinator in June 2022. (HQ: Los Angeles)
Solosuit (W21 COHORT)
SoloSuit offers court paperwork and a settlement service to assist consumers in ending debt collection cases. (HQ: Provo UT, founded in 2018 by George Simons, Scott Erickson)
Draftwise (S20 COHORT)
A cutting-edge knowledge platform for the legal sector is being developed by DraftWise. Its main offering first makes historical legal contracts that businesses have drafted for clients throughout the years accessible. To assist lawyers and legal professionals in creating better, safer contracts, it makes advantage of the most recent developments in data management, machine learning, and language analytics. (HQ: New York, founded in 2020 by James Ding, Ozan Yalti and Emre Ozen)
Axdraft(W19 COHORT)
Axdraft is a German legal tech company founded in 2017 by Oleg Zaremba, Yuriy Zaremba. AXDRAFT examines patterns in your legal documents and converts the laborious and inaccurate copy-and-paste process into a simple Q&A that is error-free. AXDRAFT takes less than 4 minutes on average to draft a document.
TaxProper (S19 COHORT)
An enterprise SaaS solution called TaxProper collects real-time data on property taxes, encodes local tax laws, and has all of the operational workflows needed to manage property taxes. It was founded in 2019 by Thomas Dowling and Geoff Segal in Chicago.
Version Story (W21 COHORT)
Version Story generates comparisons and organizes a document’s history in an easy-to-use manner. It was designed to flow naturally into your workflow. Legal professionals, publishers, content providers, academic researchers, writers of documentation, and operations teams can easily compare, track, and combine documents with Version Story. (HQ: New York, founded in 2021 by Kevin O’ Connell and Jordan Bryan)
Rebank (W19 COHORT)
Rebank is a substitute for protracted email threads with attorneys and accountants. Today’s startups are by nature more global, thus they need to consider their intercompany agreements more quickly than in the past. Rebank generates documents and coordinate work between your organizations to automate intercompany and transfer pricing agreements. (HQ: London)
Cohort Analysis
Industry Focus
- Legaltech : A significant number of startups like Hidden Hand, Casehopper, Docsum, Atla, and Kula have developed solutions catering to the needs of lawyers and legal professionals.
- AI-Powered Solutions : Many startups such as Hidden Hand, Casehopper, and Docsum are leveraging artificial intelligence for solutions in their respective domains.
- Financial & Compliance Sector : Startups like Greenlite, Hadrius, and FinFlx focus on financial wrongdoing, compliance, and pension plans.
- Document Management : Startups like Docsum, UpLink, Waveline, and Type emphasize document creation, processing, and management.
Geographical Distribution
- USA : The majority of startups are based out of cities like San Francisco, New York, and Seattle.
- Europe : Several startups originate from European cities like London, Switzerland, and Germany.
- Asia : There’s representation from Asian countries as well, with startups like Legistify from India and Panadata from Panama.
Founding Year & Cohort
- Most startups are from recent cohorts (S23, W23, S22), indicating a surge in startup founding and incubation in the last two years.
- There’s a fair distribution of startups across the years, with a few older ones like Keynua and Spire Law from the W19 cohort.
Unique Offerings
- Automated Processes : Startups like Hidden Hand and Greenlite emphasize automation in their solutions.
- Training & Learning : Affinity focuses on compliance training for sectors with strict regulations.
- Global Business : Axis provides a unique solution for businesses looking to expand internationally by offering a knowledge repository.
Co-founders & Team
- Diverse teams can be observed, with several startups having multiple co-founders. This can indicate collaboration and a multidisciplinary approach.
- A few startups like Marqvision have backing from prestigious institutions or investors, suggesting strong potential and credibility.
Target Audience & Benefits
- Law Firms : Tools that cater directly to law firms such as Kula and Atla help streamline processes.
- Businesses & Corporates : Solutions like Rebank and Axis aim to assist businesses in handling legal and international expansion matters.
Trends & Observations
- AI and Legal : A trend of merging AI with legal processes is evident, streamlining tasks that were previously time-consuming.
- Global Outreach : Startups like Axis and Rebank show a shift towards globalizing business operations, making international business more accessible.
Core Emergent Themes
- Strong push for AI-powered solutions
- Geographical distribution highlights that most legaltech startups are now global in nature.
- STREAMLINING PROCESSES is the name of the game.
Disclaimers/Caveats:
- Data Completeness: The analysis is based on the data provided and does not claim to capture the entirety of the startup landscape for the specified cohorts or industries.
- Interpretation: The categories and classifications used in this analysis are interpretations based on the provided descriptions. Different interpretations may lead to different conclusions.
- External Factors: This analysis does not account for external market or global factors that might influence the number or nature of startups in any given year or location.
- Accuracy: While efforts have been made to ensure the accuracy of this analysis, there might be unintentional oversights or errors.
- Static Analysis: The analysis is static and provides a snapshot based on the current dataset. As more data becomes available or conditions change, the conclusions might evolve.