The Scissero-Robin AI Deal + Mathias Strasser Interview

As Artificial Lawyer wrote yesterday, Scissero, an AI-enabled legal services business, has acquired the managed services team of Robin AI, after the startup failed to raise a new round and thus sought a buyer. AL looks at the deal and talks to Scissero CEO, Mathias Strasser.

The Deal

The combination of the two groups will create what Scissero describes as ‘a London-based legal tech powerhouse serving large, international clients, including globally renowned investment houses, and FTSE 100 and Fortune 500 firms’.

Scissero currently has around 85 staff, and they are taking on approximately 70 people from Robin AI’s services side. This brings the combined organisation to more than 150 people – including lawyers, client-success managers, software developers, and AI engineers.

The Robin AI tech group, including Robin’s CEO, Richard Robinson, will not be joining. In part because Scissero has been developing its own legal AI solutions since 2017 – so there would have been a lot of overlap. AL understands that this tech group is still in talks with another buyer and that Robinson’s ultimate destination is also still not decided.

As part of the transaction, other members of Robin’s leadership team, including Olivia Vaughan (VP Legal) and Ryan Cattle (Global Head of Legal), will join Scissero.

The move ‘marks a major step in Scissero’s strategy to redefine how legal work is delivered, combining advanced AI with regulated legal expertise to create faster, more consistent and more cost-effective outcomes for clients,’ the ‘NewMod’ business concluded.

How We Got Here

This brings an end to Robin AI as it was known, an AI-driven startup that blended tech and a sizeable group of legal talent to handle areas such as contract review. They had some initial experiments, then when genAI arrived went all-in with Anthropic’s LLMs and gained plenty of funding, opened new offices and hired tens of new staff.

However, from the outside looking in, it seems that several things may have led to investor worries. The first was simply that the revenue in 2025 was insufficient to meet investor expectations. Robin AI had boosted income by buying some of LawGeex’s book of business – ironically a legal tech startup that used a similar model of AI and people, but was perhaps a bit too far ahead of its time. But, that was not enough. AL has heard various figures, but even the more optimistic ones clearly concerned those funds considering an investment.

Thus, a new funding round this year failed to gain traction and that triggered a series of events that soon led to the sale of the business. Robin AI still managed to attract multiple offers from potential buyers, which shows that despite the challenges they faced, the legal tech market valued the business that Robinson had built.

In a prepared statement about the deal, Robinson commented: ‘Becoming part of Scissero marks an exciting new chapter for our managed services team and our clients. Scissero’s global capabilities, regulated legal services offering, and market-leading technology platform mean our clients will now benefit from a broader set of solutions while continuing to receive the high-quality service and fast turnaround times they rely on.

‘We are confident that Scissero is the ideal home for our managed services business, and we look forward to seeing our team thrive as part of their organisation.’

As noted, he will not be joining Scissero, but will help with the transition process. AL will keep you posted about what Robinson does next.

AL Interview with Mathias Strasser, CEO of Scissero

Why have you done this deal? How will it help Scissero?

We started in 2017 with two entities – Fincap Law (a law firm) and Scissero (a legal tech company). We always believed the future wouldn’t belong to “ChatGPT wrapper” companies but to law firms that combine deep legal expertise with AI in a meaningful, disciplined way. For that reason, we merged the two entities under the Scissero brand in 2024 to create a true “new model” law firm.

Today we operate as a vertically integrated law firm and legal-tech provider, with AI technology we believe stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the likes of Harvey, Legora, and Hebbia. In fact, we were recently evaluated by a major London law firm on the quality of our data extraction against Legora, and our results were found to be indistinguishable. We’ve long admired what Richard and the team built at Robin AI – their people are first-class and their client roster speaks for itself. Our cultures also align: both organisations are relentlessly client-focused.

Some of our AI technologies – particularly around markups for M&A ancillary documents such as NDAs, engagement letters, and non-reliance letters – slot directly into the services Robin AI provides, making this a natural “glove-in-hand” combination. The transaction roughly doubles our team and expands us to more than 100 clients, increasing our visibility and allowing us to cross-sell both our legal services and our technology to a much larger client base.

People talk about “AI bubble fatigue” as if we’ve reached the end of the AI story. We see it differently. This isn’t the beginning of the end – it’s the end of the beginning. The next phase belongs to tech-enabled services firms that can combine AI, domain knowledge, proprietary data, and genuine service delivery to create measurable efficiency gains. At Scissero, we’re proud to be an early leader in the consolidation of this emerging industry.

And importantly, we believe digital sovereignty matters. We run our own NVIDIA infrastructure and our own models – alongside open-source and frontier systems – which gives clients confidence in how their data is handled and how their AI layer is governed.

Would you call Scissero an AI-first law firm or a New Model law firm? How does it work, and where does the Robin AI team fit?

Scissero is absolutely a “New Model” law firm. We’re regulated as an Alternative Business Structure by the SRA in the UK and as a law firm in New York. We are service-first, but we treat technology, and especially AI, as a core enabler. Unlike traditional firms, we believe you must control the technology layer to achieve real efficiency gains – you can’t simply be a wrapper around someone else’s LLM. Otherwise, you end up like many of the companies cited in the recent MIT study, where only 5% achieved a real ROI on their AI investments. To differentiate, you need state-of-the-art tooling and the capability to tailor it to your lawyers and operations.

That is exactly what this transaction allows us to deepen. The Robin AI team is exceptional, and we’re excited to integrate them into our legal teams and equip them with our agentic AI technologies to make their work faster, more precise, and more scalable.

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Conclusion

So, there you go. Thus ends Robin AI, at least as the business it once was. As is often the case, the early pioneers experience an incredible ride, but not all of them have an easy journey. In this case, it didn’t work out, but a large part of the Robin team has found a new home where they will be a good fit. And for them a new chapter begins.

For Scissero, the group hire is a huge opportunity to accelerate the growth of an already profitable and successful business that taps the ‘NewMod’ strategy of accepting that ‘AI exists’ and then trying to build a legal services business around that tech reality. We can expect to hear a lot more about Scissero in the months ahead.

Good luck to all involved.

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More about Scissero here.