Orbital Raises $60m, LexisNexis-Connected Fund Invests

Orbital has raised $60m in a Series B funding led by Brighton Park Capital, with REV, the venture capital arm of RELX, which owns LexisNexis, also investing. AL interviewed CEO Will Pearce (see below) about the funding and journey from using satellite technology to pioneering AI use in real estate work.

Orbital got started around 2018 and was an early member of Mishcon de Reya’s MDR Lab. Back then the idea was to use satellite images to help lawyers with assessing property issues, but it has evolved and today is very much about leveraging genAI.

Last year (see AL AI insurance story) they also became the first legal tech company to develop a product-specific insurance policy for their AI outputs.

Now, with $60m in fresh capital, they are poised to rapidly grow even further after already becoming arguably the leader in real estate legal AI in the UK. Plus, some of the cash will be used to continue their expansion into the US market. For example, Orbital ended 2025 supporting 200,000 real estate transactions across the US and UK.

So, what do they do?

They describe it this way: ‘By combining AI optimized for real estate law with spatial visualization, mapping, and real estate data, Orbital automates real estate legal work and enables transactions to progress faster.

‘This replaces manual, document-heavy review across hundreds of interdependent records, maps and historic deeds (many of which date back decades or even centuries) and chart the course to fully automated AI-driven real estate legal processes, introducing speed and transparency for the world’s largest asset class.’

The funding round will also support Orbital’s goal to build ‘a single, secure workspace for real estate legal work across the lifecycle of the entire real estate asset class’. Following the opening of its New York office in 2025, the company will now double headcount and establish additional US hubs.

Commenting on the RELX investment, Sean Fitzpatrick, CEO of LexisNexis North America, UK & Ireland, said: ‘LexisNexis and REV invest in customer-centric innovators who strive to make it easier for legal professionals to do their work. Orbital shares our commitment to advancing legal AI innovation that helps professionals achieve better outcomes and drive greater value for their organizations.’

And now the AL Interview with CEO Will Pearce.

It’s been a long journey, can you tell AL’s readers what it’s been like and on a personal level what this funding means for you?

‘In some ways, it has been a long journey, but honestly, it still feels like we’re only just getting started. And I expect the journey to be much, much longer still!

When we founded Orbital, it was pre–generative AI. We got going properly in 2018 and were working with mapping and geospatial data because we believed the big bottleneck in real estate transactions was access to the right real estate information, in the right context, at the right time. Our mission hasn’t changed since day one: building technology for real estate legal work and streamlining real estate transactions for lawyers and the entire real estate ecosystem.

We were building AI systems from the start, long before it became fashionable. Most of our first funding went towards hiring real estate paralegals to create labelled datasets for training our own machine learning models (back when that was a thing!). Years before ChatGPT, we won government funding to research NLP and machine-learning techniques for real estate legal text, partnered with machine learning academics, and sponsored AI researchers. We pivoted quickly to a GenAI stack in 2023, but throughout, we’ve maintained the same focus: real estate legal work powered by an AI-first approach, even when that was uncommon in legal tech.

Many legal AI businesses started with the technology first, and it’s obvious why. GenAI is powerful, and legal is a natural use case. We took the opposite approach. We started with the problem: understanding how real estate transactions actually work, how the legal work gets done, and how information is found and verified. That meant that when GenAI arrived, we weren’t searching for something to do with it; we were able to react quickly because we already had domain understanding, data, and years of groundwork behind us.

And when I say react quickly, we were among the first in the world to build a LegalAI agent at the end of 2023. In the last few years, it’s felt like the second chapter of the business, where we’ve been able to build on those foundational years and move at a completely different pace. We’ve added more revenue in the last 3 months than in our whole first four years, which is a testament to the team’s execution and staying focused on that journey that has been a little longer than others’.

On a personal level, this funding means one thing: it’s go time. It’s an opportunity and a vote of confidence from both our customers and our investors to execute on what we’ve believed from the start. I’m moving to the US as we expand our NYC base and open multiple offices across America, the world’s largest real estate and legal services market. We’re continuing to invest in products for both the UK and US real estate legal ecosystems. Our goal is to build an AI-first company that automates legal processes around the world’s largest asset class, starting with lawyers, then expanding across the wider real estate markets in both countries and beyond.’

Thanks and congrats. Looking forward to seeing Orbital grow across America!

Other investors included: The LegalTech Fund; Moderne Ventures; and Grosvenor Group, the international real estate company and an existing Orbital customer. Existing investors including JLL Spark, Outward, and Seedcamp also participated in the round.

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More about Orbital here.