Legal AI assistant start-up jhana has raised $1.6 million in its first round of funding in a round led by Girish Mathrubootham, the founder of Freshworks, and Manav Garg, the founder of Eka Software, through their venture capital fund, Together Fund.
The funding round also saw participation from other operators and funds including Shyamal Anadkat — angel investor and member of the Applied AI team at OpenAI, Scott Davis — former Vice-President of the cloud company VMWare, Harshil Mathur and Shashank Kumar — the founders of Razorpay, Cred’s Kunal Shah and others.
Founded in 2022 by Harvard classmates Em McGlone, Hemanth Bharatha Chakravarthy, and Benjamin Hoffner-Brodsky, the Bengaluru-based start-up has been beta-testing and selling its AI legal assistants to lawyers, firms, and in-house teams of various tiers across India. The product helps lawyers produce research and review documents faster and with fewer errors. jhana’s interdisciplinary team consists of ML scientists, legal scholars, and former practicing lawyers. It claims over 800 users beta-test its tools. Founded in the US, the co-founders have moved to India to build the start-up here.
jhana’s AI-powered Paralegal tool takes natural language messages and reads legal files to produce outputs such as propositions, citations, advisory or even full-fledged memos. Its models cite and quote their sources from a proprietary 15M+ dataset of case law and acts, the start-up said in a statement.
The start-up intends to use the new funds to develop proprietary datasets and models as well as to hire researchers both in the law and artificial intelligence. “Lawyers are some of the smartest and most competent people, but lose significant portions of their time doing mundane tasks like needle-in-a-haystack retrieval and patterned negotiation,” said Hemanth Bharatha Chakravarthy, co-founder, jhana. “So, the intention of our experiments with embedding AI in legal systems is to see how legal work can become its most creative, satisfying, and realised self; to see how assistants can make the law more intelligible for both the lawyer and client.”
“At Together Fund, we are excited to support innovative companies that leverage AI to address key challenges in the legal landscape. jhana’s AI-driven paralegal solution has the potential to transform how legal professionals operate, enhancing efficiency and accessibility within the domestic market. We look forward to partnering with the team as they continue to redefine the future of legal support,” Manav Garg, the Founder of Eka Software and SaaSBhoomi and a Managing Partner at Together Fund said.