Artificial intelligence has turned one of Silicon Valley’s least fashionable sectors into one of its hottest. Investors are pouring money into legal startups, hoping to find the next breakout winner before everyone else does.
For a long time, building software for lawyers felt like a contrarian bet. Investors saw legal tech as too small a category, with slow-moving customers and long sales cycles.
ChatGPT changed the equation. Sales cycles that once stretched for years began collapsing into weeks, as founders raced to apply frontier models to take on work done by attorneys.
Investors from San Francisco to London are now looking to fill a Harvey-sized hole in their portfolios. Funding to legal startups worldwide reached $2.1 billion in the first half of the year, per Crunchbase data.
Business Insider asked a group of venture capitalists to nominate the year’s most promising legal startups valued at less than $1 billion. Here are their picks.
Atticus
Nominated by: Ann Crady Weiss, True Ventures (an investor)
Total funding: more than $100 million, according to the company
What it does: Atticus helps disabled and injured Americans figure out what kind of legal help they need, then connects them with the right lawyer or nonprofit to handle their case.
Why it’s promising: Atticus is part of a huge but overlooked corner of the legal market. Government and insurance programs distribute more than $1 trillion to individuals each year, but people often struggle to figure out what aid they qualify for or find a lawyer.
Atticus is making that process easier — and scaling quickly. “I’ve watched them grow from a small fry to the largest provider of legal help to disabled and injured Americans,” said Ann Crady Weiss, who sits on the company’s board.
Atticus now serves 115,000 people a year and says it has secured more than $7 billion in lifetime aid for clients.
Courtroom
Nominated by: Helen Min, True Ventures (not an investor)
Total funding: Undisclosed
What it does: Courtroom lets litigation teams test their case against simulated juries and judges. Lawyers can upload case materials and see how different arguments, witnesses, and narratives might land.
Why it’s promising: Founder Elizabeth Grabowski Parikh learned how litigation teams build a case while working in-house at a startup and pursuing companies accused of infringing its patents. In June, Courtroom launched from stealth with backing from a notable group that included OpenAI employees and Relativity’s venture arm.
Helen Min said Courtroom borrows a playbook already proven in marketing: using simulated audiences to test how a message will go over before it goes live. Here, the audience is made up of digital clones — and the stakes are much higher.
Crosby
Nominated by: Abby Meyers, Bain Capital Ventures (an investor), and Aydin Senkut, Felicis (not an investor)
Total funding: $86 million, according to the company
What it does: Crosby is a law firm that sells basic legal services to other companies, mostly early-stage startups. The company pairs lawyers with software it builds on top of frontier models.
Why it’s promising: “Rather than selling customers a tool, Crosby delivers a service” from start to finish, investor Abby Meyers said. That could give Crosby an important advantage. Customers may be less likely to replace Crosby with a product from a major lab or try to build a similar tool themselves.
Crosby also learns from every contract it reviews, Meyers said, creating a pool of proprietary data that could help make its service better over time. The company recently worked with Micro1 to build a benchmark for measuring how well models negotiate contracts.
DeepJudge
Nominated by: Aydin Senkut, Felicis (an investor)
Total funding: $53 million, according to the company
What it does: DeepJudge helps lawyers find out what their firms already know. The software searches across documents, emails, and past work, then connects that knowledge to agents and workflows.
Why it’s promising: Rather than competing with the likes of Harvey, DeepJudge is positioning itself as the layer that makes Harvey and other tools smarter about how a particular piece of work actually works. Customers include Freshfields, Holland & Knight, Cozen O’Connor, and Greenberg Traurig.
Felicis and Coatue backed the company’s $42 million Series A in November. Investor Aydin Senkut said the three founders, all former Google researchers based in Zurich, represent “exactly the kind of technical bar we look for in a category this competitive.”
GC AI
Nominated by: Max Abram, Scale Venture Partners (an investor), and Mallun Yen, Operator Collective (not an investor)
Total funding: $73 million, according to the company
What it does: GC AI speeds up contract work for corporate legal teams by helping them draft agreements, review terms, and pull answers from their documents.
Why it’s promising: Tools that make lawyers faster can be a tough sell to firms that bill by the hour. In-house legal teams have the opposite problem: Efficiency is part of the job.
GC AI is built for them. The company says it already has close to 1,900 customers.
Founder Cecilia Ziniti brings credibility from having served as general counsel three times. “GC AI feels shaped by someone who has lived the daily grind of the job,” Mallun Yen said. That experience shows in a product that’s tailored for in-house lawyers, investor Max Abram said, rather than one originally designed for law firms and later adapted for companies.
Laurel
Nominated by: Miloni Madan Presler, IVP (an investor)
Total funding: $153 million, according to the company
What it does: Laurel automatically tracks how lawyers spend their workdays and turns that activity into timesheets, sparing them from piecing together their billable hours at the end of the week.
Why it’s promising: Lawyers hate tracking their time, but law firms depend on those records to get paid. Laurel automates the chore while helping firms bill for work that might otherwise slip through the cracks.
More than 150 professional services firms use the software, including EY, Cozen O’Connor, and Husch Blackwell. Investor Miloni Madan Presler is especially excited about what comes next: Laurel is pushing beyond timekeeping to help firms decide how to price work and staff it.
Learned Hand
Nominated by: Ashley Mayer, Coalition (not an investor), and Zach Posner, The LegalTech Fund (not an investor)
Total funding: $5 million, according to the company
What it does: Learned Hand serves as a digital law clerk, helping judges and court staff review motions, research the law, and prepare rulings more quickly.
Why it’s promising: Courts are drowning in paperwork and short on the clerks and research attorneys who help judges work through it. “This problem is only getting worse,” Zach Posner said.
Learned Hand is already being used by court systems in 10 states, including the Michigan Supreme Court, and is being tested in Los Angeles County, home to one of the nation’s largest court systems. Ashley Mayer called founder Shlomo Klapper, a former Second Circuit clerk and Palantir alum, the right person to build it.
Manifest OS
Nominated by: Max Abram, Scale Venture Partners (not an investor), and Yuanling Yuan, SignalFire (not an investor)
Total funding: $72 million, according to the company
What it does: Manifest is a tech-enabled law firm that recruits lawyers to practice under its banner. The attorneys handle client matters and legal strategy, while Manifest runs the back office and builds software to streamline their work.
Why it’s promising: Just as Uber put more drivers on the road by making it easier to earn money behind the wheel, Manifest is trying to help more people get legal services by enabling lawyers to take on more clients. The company started with business immigration and says it has processed more than 3,000 visa cases to date.
Investors are betting it can repeat that playbook in practice areas far beyond immigration. Manifest has “absolutely crushed its first market,” Yuanling Yuan said, calling chief executive Dan Mishin “a beast of a founder.”
Patlytics
Nominated by: Yuanling Yuan, SignalFire (an investor)
Total funding: $65 million, according to the company
What it does: Patlytics builds software for law firms and in-house legal teams to manage patent work. Its tools cover the full lifecycle, from invention disclosures and filings to portfolio management and litigation.
Why it’s promising: As Harvey and Legora battle to become the central workspace for lawyers, another group of startups is going deeper, building software for highly specialized areas of legal work. Patlytics is betting that patent law is one of those areas where a broad tool may not be enough.
That bet appears to be paying off. “The growth has been exceptional,” investor Yuanling Yuan said. Patlytics works with nearly half of the 100 highest-grossing law firms in the country, such as Latham & Watkins, Morrison Foerster, and Quinn Emanuel.
Sandstone
Nominated by: Abby Meyers, Bain Capital Ventures (not an investor), and Jimena Nowack, IVP (not an investor)
Total funding: $40 million, according to the company
What it does: Sandstone helps in-house legal departments tame the flood of requests coming their way. Its software connects with a company’s existing systems and draws on its contracts and other legal data to draft and review agreements, answer questions, and route matters to the right person.
Why it’s promising: Corporate legal teams are under pressure to do more work without adding headcount, making them eager for tools that help them move faster. That makes them a strong market for Sandstone.
Demand is already taking off. Sandstone said revenue grew more than fortyfold over a recent 90-day period, with customers such as Wayfair, Mercury, MasterClass, and ElevenLabs. To keep pace, it raised a $30 million Series A led by Lightspeed in June, just six months after closing a $10 million seed led by Sequoia.
Solve Intelligence
Nominated by: Mallun Yen, Operator Collective (an investor)
Total funding: $55 million, according to the company
What it does: Solve Intelligence helps patent teams draft filings, respond to inquiries, and analyze their portfolios. It aims to become the command center where law firms and clients collaborate across every stage of patent work.
Why it’s promising: Patent work has become one of legal tech’s newest battlegrounds, thanks to its enormous market and mountains of paperwork. Solve Intelligence is pulling ahead and profitable, said Mallun Yen, who backed the company in a $40 million round in December.
Yen spent two decades as a law firm attorney and general counsel, working with patents from both sides of the table. “I know exactly how little patience this industry has for tools that don’t hold up under scrutiny,” she said. Solve is the first tool she has seen patent attorneys trust from start to finish.
Soxton
Nominated by: Ashley Mayer, Coalition (an investor)
Total funding: $2.5 million, according to the company
What it does: Soxton is an AI-enabled law firm that helps startups handle the routine legal work of getting a company off the ground.
Why it’s promising: Most founders cannot justify hiring an expensive law firm on day one, but relying on ChatGPT for legal advice carries obvious risks. Soxton is trying to fill that gap with fast, affordable help from real lawyers. Founder Logan Brown knows the market firsthand from her time as a Cooley attorney.
Early demand suggests the need is real. More than 800 companies have used Soxton since it launched in December, and its waitlist stretches into the thousands, said Mayer, who backed the company at seed.
Wexler
Nominated by: Zach Posner, The LegalTech Fund (an investor)
Total funding: $7 million, according to the company
What it does: Wexler’s software helps litigators find answers in case documents and verify that the evidence supports their arguments. The goal is to let them move faster and build stronger cases.
Why it’s promising: Global firms like HSF Kramer, Goodwin Procter, and Clifford Chance have adopted the software, and Wexler says it has cut manual review time by 75% in some cases. The company is now pushing further into the courtroom: Its newest tool can flag false or conflicting testimony in real time during depositions and hearings.
Read the original article on Business Insider
The post 13 legal startups to watch in 2026, according to investors appeared first on Business Insider.
