A Seattle tech veteran who was Washington state’s first chief privacy officer is the co-founder of a startup using artificial intelligence to help legal professionals predict the likely outcome of cases.
Alex Alben is co-CEO of Theo Ai, which announced Wednesday that it raised $2.2 million in pre-seed funding. The company plans to use the cash to enhance its prediction engine, expand practice categories, and accelerate customer growth.
Theo Ai says that the average mid-sized law firm reviews roughly 650 cases per year, which can take anywhere between seven to 30 days to manually review. With the company’s technology, that time is compressed into seconds, as Theo Ai analyzes similar cases and likely arguments and its data model estimates the probability of winning a case, in addition to predicting the estimated award.
Alben is currently a professor at UCLA School of Law. A onetime vice president at RealNetworks and Starwave, he served in his state government role from 2015-19, where he was responsible for examining privacy policies across state agencies with an eye toward strengthening protections for personal data.
The startup was co-founded by co-CEO Patrick Ip, a Google vet with previous experience founding and leading startups. CTO Tiago Luchini has been a founder and tech leader across fintech, retail and biotech.
Launched in February, Theo Ai has seven potential customers now in trials. The startup employs five people and has a development team in Argentina.
The funding round was co-led by NextView and nvp capital, with participation from Ripple Ventures, Beat Ventures, and SCVC Fund.
There are a number of other Seatte-area startups working with AI to disrupt the legal space, including:
- Predict.law, which uses AI to help attorneys and their firms better predict the outcome of legal cases.
- Supio, which raised $25 million in August for its software platform designed to help lawyers quickly sort, search, and organize case-related data.
- Clearbrief, which raised $4 million in June for technology to help lawyers find, summarize, and verify facts for cases.
- Prophia, a startup whose platform scours and extracts key terms from commercial real estate contracts.
- Lexion, which uses AI to help legal departments manage contracts and was acquired by Docusign earlier this year.
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