Legal Tech Startup Jhana AI Secures $1.6 Million in Seed Funding for AI-Powered Legal Research Tool

Legal-tech startup Jhana. ai raises $1.6 million from Together Fund, others

The new funds will be used for development of proprietary datasets and AI models, and hiring researchers for both law and artificial intelligence. This could pave the way for democratizing access to legal services and resources in India.AI-driven legal-tech startup Jhana. ai recently closed a $1.6-million seed funding round, led by venture capital firm Together Fund. Together Fund was set up by Girish Mathrubootham and Manav Garg, founders of Freshworks and Eka Software, respectively. The round also saw participation from investors like Shyamal Anadkat (OpenAI), former VMWare executive Scott Davis, Kunal Shah of Cred, Razorpay founders Harshil Mathur and Shashank Kumar, along with angel investors Cory Levy and Ojas Shukla. The Harvard-founded startup has been offering AI legal assistants as a beta test and product to lawyers, firms and various in-house legal teams nationwide. "Jhana is bringing the cutting edge in LLM agent applications to novel use cases as well as jurisdictions in the law," said Anadkat, member of the Applied AI Team at OpenAI. The new funds will be used for development of proprietary datasets and AI models, and hiring researchers for both law and artificial intelligence. This could pave the way for democratizing access to legal services and resources in India. "An India portion of the round is still being closed and will be publicly disclosed soon," the company said in a statement. The development comes at a time when India's legal system is at the crossroads with nearly 5 crore pending cases across the country. Startups leveraging the power of AI in this arena can bridge the gap between technology and the legal system. "I want to build technology that democratizes access to justice, intelligence and strategy in the law, for all those who rely on systems of governance", said Em McGlone, co-founder of jhana.ai. This development becomes crucial for the revival of the startup ecosystem as funding for AI startups in India stood at $8.2 million in the April-June quarter, down about 82% year on year. In contrast, the United States secured $27 billion in the same quarter. In the beginning of this year, ET also reported that Krutrim AI, India's unicorn AI startup, raised a $50 million funding in a round led by Matrix Partners India at a $1-billion valuation.

Jhana.ai Raises $1.6 mn Seed Money to Develop Proprietary Datasets

Bengaluru-based AI paralegal startup Jhana.ai has announced that it has raised $ 1.6 million in a first round of funding that it began closing in December 2023. The startup, founded in Harvard in 2021, has been beta-testing and selling AI legal assistants to lawyers, firms, and in-house teams of various tiers across the country. The funds will be used to develop proprietary datasets and models as well as to hire world-class researchers both in the law and artificial intelligence domains. Girish Mathrubootham, the founder of Freshworks, and Manav Garg, the founder of Eka Software, led the funding round through their venture capital fund, Together Fund. The round also had participation from a number of other select operators and funds. Operators who participated include Shyamal Anadkat -- angel investor and member of the Applied AI team at OpenAI, Scott Davis -- former Vice President of the cloud company VMWare, Harshil Mathur and Shashank Kumar -- the founders of Razorpay and Partners at Mars Shot, Kunal Shah -- the popular founder and angel investor, Cory Levy -- investor and the founder of First Text, Z Fellows, and After School, and Ojas Shukla. An India portion of the round is still being closed and will be publicly disclosed soon. Jhana is a homegrown foundational legal intelligence lab producing datasets, models, applications, and platforms that help produce legal work easier, faster, and with higher fidelity. "At Together Fund, we are excited to support innovative companies that leverage AI to address key challenges in the legal landscape. jhana's AI-driven paralegal solution has the potential to transform how legal professionals operate, enhancing efficiency and accessibility within the domestic market. We look forward to partnering with the team as they continue to redefine the future of legal support," Manav Garg, the Founder of Eka Software and SaaSBhoomi and a Managing Partner at Together Fund, said.

jhana.ai Bags Funds To Build AI Research Tool For Lawyers

Founded in 2022, Bengaluru-based jhana.ai offers an AI-powered legal research and drafting tool for Indian lawyers and law firms Artificial intelligence (AI)-powered legal tech startup jhana.ai has raised $1.6 Mn in its ongoing maiden funding round, led by Freshworks cofounder Girish Mathrubootham's venture capital firm Together Fund. The round also saw participation from angel investor Shyamal Anadkat, former VMWare executive Scott Davis, Razorpay cofounders Harshil Mathur and Shashank Kumar, CRED's Kunal Shah and angel investors Cory Levy and Ojas Shukla. In a statement, the startup said that "an India portion" of the round is still being closed and will be announced soon. The fresh capital will be utilised to develop proprietary datasets and AI models. A portion of the funds will also be deployed to hire researchers across both law and AI domains. Founded in 2022 by Em McGlone, Hemanth Bharatha Chakravarthy and Benjamin Hoffner-Brodsky, Bengaluru-based jhana.ai offers an AI-powered legal research and drafting tool for Indian lawyers and law firms. Commenting on the fundraise, Together Fund managing partner Manav Garg said, "jhana's AI-driven paralegal solution has the potential to transform how legal professionals operate, enhancing efficiency and accessibility within the domestic market. We look forward to partnering with the team as they continue to redefine the future of legal support." The startup's AI Paralegal product leverages AI to read files and produce output such as citations, advisories, and memos for lawyers and law firms. Meanwhile, another offering called Document Intelligence reviews documents to flag risks, suggests edits, identifies deviations from standard practice, among others. The platform claims to leverage its proprietary 15 Mn+ dataset of case laws and web sources to offer cohesive legal research solutions for its clients. The startup claims that it has been incubated by the likes of Jio GenNext, AWS Public Sector Startup Hub, Microsoft Founders Hub and Google Cloud Startups Program. The development comes at a time when generative AI (GenAI) has emerged as the flavour of the season. Building on top of large language models from Google and OpenAI, new-age tech startups are leveraging the emerging technology to build new use cases and cater to customers across various domains. This has spawned the rise of more than 100+ GenAI startups that call India home. As a result, the AI space has witnessed renewed interest from investors as these homegrown players have raised more than $600 Mn between 2019 and H1 2024. Earlier in the day, Myntra and Cultfit founder Mukesh Bansal's AI startup Nurix AI bagged $27.5 Mn in its seed funding round from Accel and General Catalyst. On the same day, BharatGPT maker CoRover also bagged $4 Mn in its Series A funding round led by Venture Catalysts to scale up its conversational AI chatbots.

Legal AI start-up jhana raises $1.6 million from Girish Mathrubootham's Together Fund

Legal AI assistant start-up jhana has raised $1.6 million in its first round of funding in a round led by Girish Mathrubootham, the founder of Freshworks, and Manav Garg, the founder of Eka Software, through their venture capital fund, Together Fund. The funding round also saw participation from other operators and funds including Shyamal Anadkat -- angel investor and member of the Applied AI team at OpenAI, Scott Davis -- former Vice-President of the cloud company VMWare, Harshil Mathur and Shashank Kumar -- the founders of Razorpay, Cred's Kunal Shah and others. Founded in 2022 by Harvard classmates Em McGlone, Hemanth Bharatha Chakravarthy, and Benjamin Hoffner-Brodsky, the Bengaluru-based start-up has been beta-testing and selling its AI legal assistants to lawyers, firms, and in-house teams of various tiers across India. The product helps lawyers produce research and review documents faster and with fewer errors. jhana's interdisciplinary team consists of ML scientists, legal scholars, and former practicing lawyers. It claims over 800 users beta-test its tools. Founded in the US, the co-founders have moved to India to build the start-up here. jhana's AI-powered Paralegal tool takes natural language messages and reads legal files to produce outputs such as propositions, citations, advisory or even full-fledged memos. Its models cite and quote their sources from a proprietary 15M+ dataset of case law and acts, the start-up said in a statement. The start-up intends to use the new funds to develop proprietary datasets and models as well as to hire researchers both in the law and artificial intelligence. "Lawyers are some of the smartest and most competent people, but lose significant portions of their time doing mundane tasks like needle-in-a-haystack retrieval and patterned negotiation," said Hemanth Bharatha Chakravarthy, co-founder, jhana. "So, the intention of our experiments with embedding AI in legal systems is to see how legal work can become its most creative, satisfying, and realised self; to see how assistants can make the law more intelligible for both the lawyer and client." "At Together Fund, we are excited to support innovative companies that leverage AI to address key challenges in the legal landscape. jhana's AI-driven paralegal solution has the potential to transform how legal professionals operate, enhancing efficiency and accessibility within the domestic market. We look forward to partnering with the team as they continue to redefine the future of legal support," Manav Garg, the Founder of Eka Software and SaaSBhoomi and a Managing Partner at Together Fund said. SHARE Copy linkEmailFacebookTwitterTelegramLinkedInWhatsAppRedditPublished on September 24, 2024