French legal tech startup, Jus Mundi, a multilingual NLP-driven platform for international arbitration research, has bagged $10m in a funding round led by C4 Ventures, a European VC fund created by Pascal Cagni, a former head of Apple Europe.
The majority of the funds will be used to recruit developers, data scientists, and natural language processing specialists.
Jus Mundi’s CEO and Co-founder, Jean-Remi de Maistre, said: ‘Our AI-powered search engine uses automated natural language processing to find relevant answers to specific questions immediately, even if they are buried in 300-page PDF documents, whatever the language.’
‘You ask a question using natural language, just like on Google, and you can access, country by country, the contents of legal documents with a precision that would be otherwise impossible.’
The startup, which got going in Paris in 2019, also has an office in New York and 40% of its revenue now comes from the US. Meanwhile, about a third of its income is also from the UK.
Jus Mundi’s first-round investors Seed4Soft, Holnest, INSEAD BA, and Irish family office Elkstone are participating in this second funding round alongside the US funds Fabrice Grinda’s FJ Labs, Hank Vigil’s Acequia Capital, as well as Michaël Benabou’s family office, Financière Saint James in France.
The new funding is noteworthy on a couple of levels. First, although there are a growing number of legal tech companies in France, few hit this level of funding early on. Second, by the nature of its subject matter, Jus Mundi has the potential to grow significantly, as it has a global focus, and so too the world of commercial arbitration is equally global. It also fills a gap in the market for high value research into this segment of the disputes field.
Current customers include DLA Piper, Freshfields, Dentons, the legal departments of multinationals such as Iberdrola, and several governments including Japan and the UK.
It also shows that while it can appear sometimes that the world of legal research has plateaued out, in reality there are new challengers still emerging, albeit in this case in relation to arbitration.
And, as one would expect from this site, it’s great to see that the company started from day one seeking to leverage the better results one can gain from NLP technology – although, of course, this then demands a lot of upfront training on the part of Jus Mundi. But, the new funding will really help with that.
Pascal Cagni, President of C4 Ventures, the group that led the funding round, added: ‘We are very impressed by the Jus Mundi team and their ability to leverage AI in a way that brings concrete benefits to the legal profession. Jus Mundi has truly democratised legal search by making its search results publicly available to everyone, not just legal professionals. The company has the potential to become an international leader in legal search, and its business model is a strong differentiator.’
(Main pic: the Jus Mundi team celebrating.)