On Tuesday, Switzerland-based legal tech AI startup DeepJudge announced that it raised $10.7 million in an oversubscribed seed fund round led by investment company Coatue.
The startup also debuted a generative AI interface called Knowledge Assistant that aims to help legal departments and firms access data within their documents.
Founded in 2021 by former Google AI researchers and search engineers, DeepJudge officially launched their core Knowledge Search platform in July 2023, which uses various AI models to help legal professionals more effectively search their document management systems (DMSs). Knowledge Search integrates with a number of DMS platforms, including iManage and Microsoft’s SharePoint.
DeepJudge CEO and cofounder Paulina Grnarova told Legaltech News that she and others launched the startup to help solve a major inefficiency, and competitive disadvantage, at many law firms.
“When you hire a large law firm, you really fully expect them to be utilizing all of the previous deals and cases they have done collectively, kind of all of their collective intelligence and expertise and knowledge,” she said. “But in reality, when we were talking to lawyers, the way they were working, they would say, whenever a new case or a deal lands on my desk, I either start from scratch or a send a ‘Pardon the Interruption’ email, or I kind of ask around to decide whether someone has done something similar to this before. So this was the direction that we wanted to go into because … for us the collective knowledge is really the ‘Holy Grail’ and the competitive power of law firms.”
Grnarova noted that DeepJudge will use the funding in a several ways. “So part of the money definitely goes towards further development of the product, but then also, we’re expanding on the business and commercial side … and we’re also expanding more geographically towards the U.S. So we will use the money to support that,” she said.
To spearhead its U.S. expansion, DeepJudge tapped former Kira Systems chief strategy officer Steve Obenski, who served as an advisor to the startup before becoming its chief strategy officer this year. Grnarova said the expansion “is going pretty well… we already have some of the very large, tier one U.S. firms as customers.”
Started in Switzerland, DeepJudge also has a foothold in several European countries, including “Germany, Liechtenstein, Austria—so kind of the neighboring countries to us,” she added.
In recent years, DeepJudge been steadily expanding its staff, recently bringing on board Tony Ensinger, who formerly served as Kira’s Global Director of Sales, as the company’s new vice president of sales.
The startup also looked to hire former Kira Vice President of Global Product Kennan Samman as its chief revenue officer in mid 2023.
In July 2023, however, Samman was sued by Kira, a subsidiary of Litera, for allegedly breaching its noncompete and IP and confidentiality agreements. A year later, a Virginia federal court approved Kira’s request to bar Samman from joining Deepjudge. The case was settled by both parties in October 2024. Grnarova confirmed to Legaltech News that Samman is not with the company.
The Technology Behind the Startup
DeepJudge’s search capabilities are powered by “completely proprietary technology” that the startup has trained to “provide very accurate results in a legal setting by really understanding the intent behind the query,” Grnarova explained. She added that the search engine is used in combination with various large language models (LLMs)—the engines behind generative AI— “to increase both the precision and the recall of the search and present the results in a more concise manner.
DeepJudge also utilizes retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to ground its search to an organization’s data repoistories. Grnarova said that the startup is focused on “explainability of our product and providing detailed and accurate references to the underlying sources and really keeping the human in the loop and enabling the human to see transparently what is going on…”
She added that the release of Knowledge Assistant, which allows users to tap into a generative AI interface to find and access their internal data, was an obvious next step for DeepJudge, given its search capabilities. “We have found that connecting LLM applications to internal data is a major hurdle for organizations trying to introduce modern generative AI into their processes. And given that our search engine already provides a comprehensive, enterprise-ready connection to all internal data, we kind of deemed it very natural that that connection is extended to an LLM on top.”
Specifically, Knowledge Assistant “comprises a set of functionalities to connect user-facing generative AI technologies to the world-class retrieval that we offer with our search engine. Asking questions in a conversational format about your documents is one of these functionalities…”, Grnarova explained. .
DeepJudge is the latest legal tech company to leverage generative AI to enhance search functions, following many others, including Thomson Reuters and LexisNeixs.
However, Grnarova said that the startup looks to standout in a number of ways. “The first one is the fact that we integrate with various different internal sources, so not just one, but basically we provide unified access over everything internally. Then, on top of that, what is pretty special is that it’s secure, scalable and intent-based.”
DeepJudge’s investment is one of the largest seed funding rounds thus far this year. In May, Swedish legal tech startup Leya, which offers a generative AI assistant that looks to help streamline legal tasks, announced $10.5 million in seed funding, while in March, compliance filing startup SingleFile disclosed it raised $6.5 million in an extended seed funding round.