It is time to reinvent the U.S. legal system
The MIT-born startup raised $2.6M from Eniac Ventures to replace lawyers with AI.
By Tim Young, Founding General Partner, Eniac Ventures
According to the Thomson Reuters Legal Executive Institute, the U.S. Legal Services reached upwards of $437B in 2017, and with law firms’ business models being predicated on inefficiencies, Eniac has long been bullish on a company that can capture the spend and make the provision of legal services far more effective.
Enter Legit — the company that we believe is going to reinvent the U.S. legal system one vertical at a time, from IP to tax, M&A and litigation. They are well on their way because today, we are excited to announce that Eniac has led their $2.6M seed round.
Born from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, Legit has started by tackling the burdensome process for creators of Intellectual Property. On average, up to 80% of a company’s value is in non-tangible assets like IP. The current inefficient processes to identify and create new intellectual property may be one of the most overlooked pain points enterprises face, especially now, when protecting IP is absolutely mission-critical.
Legit has built the first software for designers, researchers, scientists, engineers, scalable to large R&D departments. Their proprietary natural language processing (NLP) software provides an easy-to-use interface to determine the patentable aspects of what they are working on, give real-time feedback against patent data and guide towards what is truly unique. Once complete, the output is ready to file.
Legit is saving companies massive amounts of time and hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees in what would otherwise be spent on input, research, correcting errors, etc. Already, they have seen impressive momentum with Fortune 500s, including the largest manufacturer of industrial tools and household hardware.
Eniac always looks for teams with deep technical experts and the Legit Team is no exception.
Co-founder and CEO, Matt Osman was the youngest VP at a $1 billion structured credit hedge fund in London where he specialized in credit strategies and tax structuring. He graduated from Oxford with a degree in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics.
Jacob Rosen, Co-founder and CTO, is an internationally recognized for his work “Tax Non-Compliance Detection Using Co-Evolution of Tax Evasion Risk and Audit Likelihood” which won the Best Innovative Application Paper Award at ICAIL 2015. He holds an M.S. from MIT and a B.S. in mathematics from the University of Michigan.
We are excited to continue to support the team as they continue to grow and are enthusiastic about their early commitment to diversity and support for female engineers.
“Legit has been dedicated to building a diverse staff from the beginning, not only because it makes sense businesswise but because it is the right thing to do,” said Dr. Anthony Bucci, Legit’s Chief Scientist. “Early on we reached out to organizations such as Black Girls Code, Girl Develop It, Girls Who Code and Women in Tech, to name a few. We have also taken great pains to ensure our interview process is not stacked against women or minorities.”
Two extraordinary women recently joined the team. Dr. Mengke Hu joined as Legit’s Senior Research Scientist. She has a Ph.D. in applying NLP to patent data. Yuan Geng recently came onboard as the Head of Product, formerly leading product management for TripAdvisor and Amazon.
Eniac is incredibly excited to be supporting the Legit team in building the first AI company to create a solution for generating IP at scale.
Check them out at legit.ai and follow on Twitter @legitpatents.
