Australian-based legal software platform Josef, has raised $2.5 million in a funding round led by Australian venture capital company Carthona Capital along with US investors that include The LegalTech Fund.
Added to the startup’s $1 million seed round in 2019, it has total funding to $3.5 million.
Josef’s software enables legal professionals to automate legal tasks such as interacting with clients, sending emails, generating legal documents and providing legal guidance and advice.
Users can automate document drafting, build bots to handle client interviews, triage paperwork or execute NDAs and generate personalized documents, from letters to contracts.
Founded in 2017 by two lawyers, CEO Tom Dreyfus and COO Sam Flynn, and engineer Kirill Kliavin, now CTO, the company — which is named for the protagonist in Kafka’s novel The Trial, Josef K — says its software has so far been used to create over 6,000 bots.
COO Flynn said the new funding will be used by the company to capitalize on its growth so far, expand its overseas business, and “become a household name for LegalTech.”
“Legal help is inaccessible. Most people can’t afford it, and those who can find it opaque and inconvenient,” Flynn said in a statement. “We set out to solve this problem by empowering lawyers to change the way they work.
“This funding will help us to level up and take Josef global, building a world-class team throughout Europe and North America. With the support of the LegalTech Fund, we have the partners to make that happen.”
Josef says its clients include major law firms such as Herbert Smith Freehills, as well as in-house legal teams from L’Oreal and Randstad. It said that the COVID-19 pandemic provided a boost as legal teams searched for ways to streamline their systems and processes and reduce friction points.
The LegalTech Fund partner Zach Posner described Josef’s automation platform as “like magic.”
“Josef’s mission is to help all legal professionals capitalize on their knowledge and become developers themselves,” Posner said. “They have built a simple, elegant ‘automation workbench’ for individuals to make their roles navigating the legal system easier and more efficient.”
