While public markets flinch at every new AI headline, Melbourne-based Affinda is doing something unfashionable in tech right now: raising money, growing revenue, and selling actual products lawyers use.
In a fresh $25 million funding round, Affinda lifted its valuation to $220 million, up from $120 million in mid-2024. The round was led again by Toll Group founder Paul Little, with backing from Ellerston Capital’s Ashok Jacob and former MYOB and REA Group CEO Greg Ellis.
No meme tokens. No vaporware. Just document AI doing unglamorous but billable work.
From “Legal AI Tool” to AI-Native Infrastructure
Affinda isn’t trying to replace lawyers with chatbots. It’s doing something far more dangerous to incumbents: making legal work faster, cheaper and harder to justify billing for inefficiency.
Its products already sit quietly inside major organisations:
- Draftable, used by firms including Allens, compares contracts and instantly flags changes lawyers used to hunt down manually at 1am.
- Affinda’s core platform parses and structures massive volumes of documents, turning unholy PDF chaos into usable, searchable data.
- Recruitment giant Seek uses it to process multilingual CVs at scale, which tells you this is industrial AI, not a demo deck.
Draftable now accounts for around 30 percent of Affinda’s revenue, with the rest coming from its data-parsing platform and consulting arm Pathfindr.
Why Legal AI Is Brutal for Big Software Firms
Affinda CEO Tim Toner (pictured alongside fellow co-founder, brother and scientist Ben Tomer) is refreshingly blunt about what’s happening to traditional software companies.
“It’s become really easy to clone software,” he says. And he’s right. Between OpenAI, Anthropic, and internal engineering teams armed with APIs, bloated SaaS margins are under siege.
“Being a small software vendor is very challenging, and equally, being a big, overpriced software vendor is also very challenging. But thanks to the influence of my brother Ben, we have been AI-based from the ground up. AI feels like bad news for the incumbents, but it’s great news for lean, AI-native companies like us,” Tim Toner told the Australian Financial Review.
The recent sell-off in listed software stocks, including WiseTech Global, reflects that reality. AI doesn’t politely disrupt incumbents. It eats their lunch, bills them for the napkins, and moves on.
Affinda’s edge is that it was AI-native from the start, founded back in 2012, long before “legal AI” became a conference buzzword.
Serious Backers, Serious Legal Firepower
Affinda’s investor list reads less like a crypto Discord and more like a long lunch at the Melbourne Club.
Paul Little has now invested four times, anchoring this round with $15 million. Private equity figures including Mark De Ambrosis (Armitage Associates) and Cheviot co-founders Nick Speer and John Russell also put in personal capital.
On the legal side, Affinda quietly made a very telling hire: Chris Betts, (pictured) former Skadden Arps partner and ex-general counsel of Grab, which pulled off a US$40 billion Nasdaq listing.
That’s not a “maybe one day” hire but an IPO-grade governance being installed early.
Legal AI Agents, Not Gimmicks
Affinda’s recent $15 million acquisition of AI consultancy Pathfindr has already paid dividends. Pathfindr signed a partnership with OpenAI to help roll out ChatGPT to corporate clients across Australia and New Zealand.
The new capital will fund Affinda’s AI agent platform, designed to help organisations actually deploy AI safely, profitably and without torching their risk profile.
For law firms and in-house teams, this is the uncomfortable middle ground where legal AI stops being experimental and starts being operational, transforming the legal world rapidly.
ASX Listing? Eventually. Calm Down.
An IPO is on the horizon, likely on the ASX, but not imminently. Affinda is forecasting $20–25 million in revenue this year, with a longer-term target of $50 million already in sight.
In other words, they’re still building. And crucially, doing so with returning investors taking more than 80 percent of the round, which is usually the loudest vote of confidence you’ll ever hear in private markets.
Key Points For Lawyers
Legal AI isn’t coming for your job. It’s coming for your inefficiencies, your manual processes, and your favourite “this is how we’ve always done it” excuses.
Affinda’s rise shows where the real legal AI value is heading:
- Document intelligence, not chatbot theatre
- AI embedded into workflows, not bolted on
- Tools that partners actually trust with client data
This is what legal AI looks like once the hype cycle sobers up.
And it’s why firms ignoring AI-native vendors now will be explaining themselves to clients later.
Quietly. And expensively.
