Y-Combinator’s latest batch of incubator cohort members cover a wide range, but two that stood out to Artificial Lawyer are: &AI, which is focused on IP, and Wordware, which helps you to build AI agents.
First the minimally-branded &AI.
They aim to be ‘the definitive platform for patent due diligence’ and do a lot…!
- ‘Comprehensive prior art search – We locate the most relevant prior art in moments, saving you time and money compared to outsourced search firms. Each reference is automatically analyzed and charted for you.
- High-quality claim charts – We generate comprehensive claim charts for your patent or claims against any reference. You can fine-tune the charts in-app or export any combination of charts to formatted Word or Excel.
- Streamlined novelty diligence – We analyze the robustness of your proposed claims and identify potential gaps in the prior art. If you are faced with a §102 or §103 rejection, we help respond to the examiner’s analysis.
- Detailed portfolio analysis – We provide portfolio-level analysis of your patents and applications, including a detailed breakdown of your portfolio’s strengths and weaknesses.
- Document search – Search&AI lets you search your documents and USPTO data, semantically or with keywords, to find exactly what you’re looking for.
- AI-powered chat – Chat&AI, a chatbot engineered to understand patents and legal material, lets you chat about and summarize your documents and USPTO data.’
CEO, Caleb Harris, was at MIT and has worked with Fish & Richardson and Gibson Dunn in the US, while CTO and fellow co-founder, Herbert Turner, was also at MIT and did some LLM work at Google.
Their Y-Combinator page is really interesting. Often these spots are just marketing blurb, but the one for &AI really goes into the economics of why their tool is useful.
It states, by way of an example matter for IP lawyers:
‘The attorneys meet with an outsourced search provider and give them their claims and features of interest. After a week or two, the provider returns with 5-10 reasonable documents, charging up to $10k.
The attorneys manually use boolean keyword searches through databases like Google Patents and decades-old legal research platforms. Over the course of 10-20 billed hours, they have found 5-10 reasonable documents.
In either case, they have already contributed a massive amount of resources to this project without much validation that they are going in the right direction.
With their prior art in hand, the attorneys must evaluate the claims with respect to the art. This involves drafting work products like claim charts, which require several read-throughs of each document to identify and map the relevant language over the course of 20-40 billed hours.
What if they haven’t found the invalidating art? They repeat the process. Over and over again, for every patent, for every case. Due diligence can continue almost indefinitely, and it’s only limited by attorney time and client budgets.’
So, that is the challenge that needs to be addressed, they explain. Their answer is:
‘Now, imagine the law firm is using &AI. Upon receiving the patent or claims, they find the invalidating prior art and export comprehensive claim charts in seconds! &AI enables both attorneys and inventors to conduct their patent due diligence at a speed, scale, and quality that has never before been possible.
In minutes, we can analyze and compare the inventive aspects of thousands of patents, allowing attorneys to spend less time on tedious work and more time developing their arguments.
We’ve built our platform to be broadly applicable and easy to use. Users can leverage our AI for patent applications, responses to office actions, and invalidity, with use cases of freedom to operate, infringement, and portfolio analysis coming soon.’
So, there you go. There has been a surge in IP-related genAI products since 2022 – and no wonder. GenAI is really useful for this type of work as it can get into language understanding in ways that older ML/NLP just could not.
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WordWare is also a recent Y-Combinator cohort member and focuses on helping you to build ‘complex AI agents’. Now, it’s not made just for legal, but one can certainly see a lot of folks in legal tech taking a look at it. And, they actually give contract generation as a key use case.
As they explain: ‘Wordware is an IDE (integrated development environment) that enables anyone to build complex AI Agents and applications. Domain experts and engineers can now iterate 20x faster with prebuilt tools, API deployment, tracing, and more.
Currently, prompting is mostly done by engineers inside the code base. This is just a coincidence, and it yields poor quality and a long iteration cycle due to communication overhead with domain experts.
Wordware is the go-to tool for these cross-functional teams. Our clients range from AI tinkerers developing their ideas to large companies using Wordware as their whole LLM backend.
It’s a tool (an IDE) that enables you to quickly build custom AI agents for specific use cases, like legal contract generation, marketing content automation, invoice analysis, candidate screening, generating PRDs, and many more. We call applications built on Wordware ‘WordApps’ because you can create them using natural language—in other words, using words (pun intended).’
And once more they refer to lawyers, and in terms that many in legal tech may agree with:
‘Our core belief is that the domain expert – not the engineer – knows what good LLM output looks like.
For example, lawyers building legal SaaS need to be deeply involved in the process, and working directly in the codebase or going back and forth with engineers isn’t the way to go.
Most of our clients are cross-functional teams, including less technical members, who need to collaborate with engineers on LLM applications, such as assessing prompt outputs, and care about the speed of iterations.’
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Great stuff. Both companies look useful – and both are based in San Francisco…!
So, before I mention the Legal Innovators California conference in June 2025….let’s mention an event that is coming soon:
Legal Innovators UK Conference – London – November 6 + 7
This pioneering conference is two days at the intersection of legal innovation’s cutting edge and the people, firms, and companies leading it: Legal Innovators UK. There will also be a Startup Gallery on both days, for law firms and inhouse.
More info and tickets here.
