Supio Secures $60M to Revolutionize Legal Analysis with AI Technology

Supio, an AI-powered legal analysis platform, lands $60M | TechCrunch

Supio, a startup that uses AI to automate data collection and analysis for legal teams, has raised $60 million in a funding round led by Sapphire Ventures with participation from Mayfield and Thomson Reuters Ventures. The new capital, which brings Supio's total raised to $91 million, will be put toward growth, hiring, and go-to-market efforts, co-founder and CEO Jerry Zhou told TechCrunch. Supio plans to expand its Seattle HQ and open a new office as it roughly doubles its 100-person staff. Supio is one of the many startups vying for customers and mindshare in the AI legaltech space. While there's skepticism about just how well AI can perform certain legal tasks, law firms are under competitive pressure to embrace it -- lest they risk falling behind. According to one survey, AI adoption in the legal profession nearly tripled from 11% in 2023 to 30% in 2024. The idea for Supio came about after Zhou and Lam, Zhou's childhood friend and a co-worker at tax compliance software firm Avalara, left Avalara to build their own business. Zhou says that they saw an opportunity to "transform how people work with documents." "Every day, attorneys and paralegals spend thousands of hours manually reviewing medical records, police reports, and expert opinions," Zhou said. "Supio's core product serves these users by giving them a deep understanding of their complex, unstructured data." Supio, which focuses on personal injury law, offers an AI-powered platform that connects to law firms' existing file systems to assist with case management. Zhou claims that Supio employs "human verification" to combat AI-introduced errors and ensure reasonable accuracy. "We focus deeply on specialized [AI] model and quality control at the document and data layer," Zhou said. "Our legal AI supports over 114 case types and that number is growing in partnership with our customers." Supio has had quite a successful year, according to Zhou. Annual recurring revenue has grown 4x, as has the size of Supio's customer base. The company's clients now include Huges & Coleman, Daniel Stark, Thomas Law Offices, Whitley Law, and other personal injury and mass tort law firms. To support this (and future) expansion, Supio recently appointed heads of sales, customer success, and marketing and advertising. "AI has created a major inflection point for the legal industry as a whole," Zhou said. "Every firm across every sub-vertical of law is thinking about how they need to reinvent themselves for the AI era. If Excel transformed finance 30 years ago, AI will do the same for legal knowledge workers."

Seattle legal tech startup Supio lands $60M to help lawyers streamline data analysis

Seattle startup Supio raised $60 million to fuel growth of its software that helps lawyers quickly sort, search, and organize case-related data. The company is one of several startups using AI to streamline work for lawyers. Supio focuses on cases related to personal injury and mass tort plaintiff law (when many plaintiffs file a claim). It specializes in organizing unstructured data and letting lawyers use AI to pull relevant information. The company's annual recurring revenue has grown 4X over the past year, according to TechCrunch. Sapphire Ventures led the round, which included Mayfield and Thomson Reuters Ventures. The company has 100 employees. The latest funding comes after a separate $25 million round last year. Total funding to date is $91 million. The company was co-founded in 2021 by longtime friends CEO Jerry Zhou and CTO Kyle Lam. They started their first software business, a mobile gaming app, in 2009, and later joined Avalara and Microsoft, where they worked on product and engineering teams for Office 365. There are a number of other legal-tech startups across the Pacific Northwest, including Predict.law, Clearbrief, SingleFile, Theo AI, and Paxton.

Childhood friends turn a coffee shop meeting into a Seattle legal tech startup that just raised $60M

Supio's startup journey started in a Starbucks with a simple premise. "We wrote down all the problems that pissed us off," said Supio CEO Jerry Zhou, reflecting on the coffee shop meeting with his childhood friend Kyle Lam. "I sat in some type of startup event, and they were just like, 'find what makes you upset and go fix it.' And I was like, that's great. Let's go and do that." Four years later, Zhou and Lam are leading a fast-growing Seattle startup using AI to help lawyers wade through mounds of documents. Last week Supio announced a $60 million Series B round led by Sapphire Ventures, following its $25 million Series A in August. The company says it has grown revenue 4X since that time. Supio has carved a wedge in a crowded legal tech sector led by larger players including Harvey, which raised $300 million in February, and Vancouver, B.C.-based Clio, which raised $900 million last year. Zhou and Lam initially explored legal tech broadly, inspired by helping immigrant family members sort through legal processes. The Garfield High School grads also had experience working at Microsoft on productivity software. The founders ultimately landed on a specific target market: personal injury and mass tort plaintiff law, which involves firms that represent many clients filing similar claims. These cases involve large volumes of documents (medical records, billing data, police reports, etc.) that can be hard for general AI to parse but ripe for domain-specific AI. "One thing we understood was that all the data inside these cases are relatively finite -- they're always really similar," Zhou said. Supio's software ingests case documents and builds a "document graph" that draws connections traditionally requiring hours of human work. It can understand key elements of a case and help lawyers generate chronologies, ledgers, and draft materials. Supio isn't out to replace human employees at law firms, Zhou said. In fact, he said paralegals are the company's "biggest fans." "Lots of firms are seizing this opportunity to be a little bit more elastic in terms of their scalability," he said. "They can take on bigger cases. They can get these through the system faster. They can help their clients." Zhou pointed to TorHoerman Law, a personal injury law firm that used Supio to secure a landmark $495 million verdict against Abbott Labs "by processing tens of thousands of these pages and being able to index and draw these conclusions for them." Supio uses a "human-in-the-loop" process to ensure its software is correctly extracting and formatting documents -- which can be crucial in an industry where accuracy can determine case outcomes. "That creates a level of quality control that I think is going to be very differentiated [from] any other product in the market," Zhou said. Supio is bucking the remote work trend and has a 5-days-in-the-office policy at its downtown Seattle headquarters. Zhou acknowledged that the in-office mandate limits the company's talent pool compared to remote companies -- but he believes in the value of gathering, particularly for an early stage startup. "There's a strong power to physical space that forms stronger relationships with people, that then increases the collaboration, especially early on," he said. Zhou also said many of the company's younger employees have never worked in an actual office. "We take great pride in the fact that we can help facilitate that," he said. The company plans to double its headcount and open satellite offices to access more talent. Supio recently appointed several key executives, including Jay Deubler (formerly at Avalara) to lead sales, Gwen Sheridan (from Highspot) to lead customer success, and Jim Sinai (previously at Salesforce and Procore) to head marketing. Supio raised a small pre-seed investment from SeaChange (now defunct) but most of its capital is from outside the Seattle region. Other backers include Mayfield, Thomson Reuters Ventures, Bonfire, and Foothill Ventures. "There's just lots of funds in the Bay Area, which just makes that density a little higher," Zhou said. "So that's kind of where we ended up. But I'm a big fan of the Seattle startup community." Supio, ranked No. 149 on the GeekWire 200, is part of a growing cohort of legal tech startups in the Pacific Northwest, including Predict.law, Clearbrief, SingleFile, Theo AI, and Paxton. Seattle startup Lexion was acquired by Docusign last year for $165 million.

Supio raises $60M to power legal analysis with generative AI - SiliconANGLE

Seattle-based legal artificial intelligence startup Supio today raised $60 million in a Series B round to build its platform that helps lawyers organize, analyze and prepare legal cases. The round was led by existing investor Sapphire Ventures, with participation from new investors Mayfield and Thomson Reuters Ventures. Today's investment brings Supio's total funding to date to $91 million. The company specializes in personal injury and mass tort plaintiff law when multiple clients file a lawsuit. It provides software that combines purpose-built AI models with human expert verification to avoid hallucinations to increase the accuracy and reliability of legal AI. According to the Supio, this has been valuable in litigation where precision and data are paramount, especially when vast amounts of unstructured data need to be processed, such as legal documents, medical documents, handwritten notes, claims and more. "We're building technology that doesn't just save time, but fundamentally improves case outcomes," said Jerry Zhou, co-founder and chief executive of Supio. Citing statistics from partner firms, Supio said its platform has led to significant improvements in win rates and case success. Travis Legal Offices reported increases of at least 20-30% per case and Thomas Law reported increasing their annual case volume by 62% since adopting Supio. In a high-stakes litigation, Supio assisted TorHoerman Law secure a massive $495 million verdict against Abbott Labs involving allegations that cow's milk-based infant formula caused intestinal inflammation in premature babies. "Supio is transforming how personal injury and mass tort litigation is practiced through specialized AI," said Rajeev Dham, partner at Sapphire Ventures and Supio board member. "We believe their exponential growth demonstrates that law firms are embracing AI tools that deliver measurable advantages in case preparation and outcomes." Still a developing industry, Supio joins many other startups looking to provide lawyers with accurate and reliable AI tools to assist them in the courtroom. Especially because general AI models can hallucinate, or produce completely false or made-up results, which means that they produce fake case citations. Numerous examples of law firms have surfaced getting themselves in trouble using AI tools including Morgan & Morgan, one of the top law firms in the United States, when an attorney blindly cited AI-hallucinated case law earlier this year. By building a solution that mitigates hallucinations through rigorous human verification, Supio said that it hopes to accelerate the adoption of its AI tools by personal injury law firms.