LexCheck, the NLP-driven contract review platform, has raised $17m in Series A funding led by the Mayfield Fund. Artificial Lawyer interviewed CEO Gary Sangha about the funding and the wider legal tech market, and also asked if Large Language Model (LLM) technology will have an impact on ‘traditional’ NLP approaches?
But, before the interview, what does the company do? In short, it helps lawyers to speed the review and revision of contracts, using digital playbooks and automated document redlining, (see image below).
How was the fundraising in the current climate?
Our process went pretty smoothly all things considered. However, it clearly hasn’t been easy for the sector as shown by the fact that few legal tech startups successfully fundraised in Q3 and Q4 of this year. Despite legal tech funding being sparse, Mayfield and our investors understood that LexCheck goes beyond a company’s legal team.
At a time of macroeconomic challenges, companies need a solution that accelerates key business processes. My prior experience as an entrepreneur, along with LexCheck’s unique product development model, success, and ease of implementation, built confidence in LexCheck’s ability to meet today’s workplace challenges head-on.
How has your company valuation changed?
It has gone up!
What will the money be spent on and how important is the international market for you? e.g. UK.
We will use this latest funding to fuel the expansion of LexCheck’s trusted contract review capabilities to accelerate growth across an organisation, specifically focusing on sales and marketing, and R&D. The international market is extremely important to us at LexCheck. We have already begun to successfully work with our customer base in the UK, and this will continue to be a high-priority market that we focus on expanding our reach.
With the rapid rise of GPT-3 and related tech, how does this change your future tech development strategy? I.e. is NLP going to need to be updated to accommodate the new LLM capabilities?
GPT-3 and related tech is incredibly exciting. While it’s still in the early stages of use, I can definitely see how it can complement existing NLP innovations. We are constantly looking at new developments in the broader world of machine learning and natural language processing. It is a fast-moving word and continues to evolve.
The team at LexCheck understands that if you don’t keep up, you’re going to be left behind. We’ve leveraged existing AI tools to date and will continue to identify new opportunities to do so.
And last, how do you see the market changing in 2023?
I’m optimistic. Assuming we don’t enter into a bad recession, I believe we will start to see an improvement in the fundraising market for legal tech startups. Along with that, we’ll continue to see an increase in legal tech adoption by lawyers to help alleviate some of the current challenges the legal industry is facing, such as high attrition and turnover rates.
Thanks Gary, and good luck with your continued expansion!