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Melbourne-based Isaacus, a developer of artificial intelligence for the legal technology sector, has raised $700,000 in a pre-seed round to drive the founder’s vision to “execute one of the most disruptive legal AI missions of the decade”.
The pre-seed round, which was supported by Aura Ventures and Galileo Ventures, is described by the company as the first VC-backed investment in foundational legal AI research and development worldwide, and one of the first investments in Australian-made sovereign AI.
Founded earlier this year by legal AI specialist Umar Butler, Isaacus says it is uniquely focused on serving the data and AI needs of the legal tech industry.
“This focus on the legal tech industry over the legal industry is deliberate and is informed by a broader thesis and vision for the future of law,” says the company.
Butler has enlisted his brother Abdur-Rahman Butler, a “statistical whiz”, and his father Anthony Butler, a former CTO of IBM, to be part of the Isaacus team.
The Isaacus founder is a former assistant director of data science at the Attorney-General’s Department where he was responsible for overseeing all the department’s national-level AI projects.
The Bachelor of Laws (Honours) graduate from La Trobe University is credited with releasing the only legal-domain extraction and classification models on the market, building the first comprehensive database of Australian legislation and case law, and inventing the world's most popular semantic chunking algorithm which is powering products at IBM and Microsoft.
His achievements include Open Australian Legal Corpus, the first open LLMs for Australian law, and Semchunk, a fast and lightweight Python library for splitting text into semantically meaningful chunks.
“As we leverage our investment to execute one of the most disruptive legal AI missions of the decade, we're sharing a primer on who we are, what our vision is for the future of legal AI, and how we plan on powering the next generation of legal tech companies,” says Umar Butler, the Isaacus CEO.
“In a nutshell, we believe legal tech companies will be the law firms of the future.
“In fact, we’re already seeing legal tech companies like Josef and AccuFind Law directly competing with law firms by selling their own lawyer-grade, AI-enabled legal services to consumers and enterprises alike.
“We think that this new market of what we call legal tech firms deserves to be recognised as an industry of its own, one that is worth having solutions tailored to its unique pain points.”
Butler says Isaacus is aiming to solve each of these pain points by delivering “superior legal research capabilities that cut far above and beyond those of general-domain retrieval models or by providing direct access to enormous amounts of high-quality legal data from the Blackstone Corpus, our proprietary, living, multijurisdictional repository of legal knowledge”.
Isaacus notes that law firms have already begun to outsource some of the most “quintessentially ‘legal’ of their legal services” to legal tech companies, including drafting contracts, researching case law and managing and evaluating risk.
“There are some markets where legal tech companies are now directly competing with law firms by offering their own legal services to consumers,” says the company.
“Those services may not yet be law-firm-grade, but that doesn’t matter to consumers who cannot otherwise afford to retain a top-tier law firm.
"This trend is only likely to continue as consumers and enterprises alike increasingly subvert traditional channels of legal service delivery in favour of AI-first legal tech firms.”
Isaacussees further growth and investment ahead into consumer-facing and enterprise-facing legal tech companies.
“Simultaneously, we expect a select number of forward-thinking law firms to begin leveraging AI to transform their siloed yet immensely valuable legal expertise into commercialised legal knowledge bases, starkly differentiating themselves from both newcomers and unreformed incumbents,” says the company.
“Our conviction is that this emerging market of next-generation legal tech companies and forward-thinking law firms has not yet been recognised as an industry of its own, one that is worth having solutions tailored to its many unique pain points.
“Given our deep experience and expertise in this area, we believe we are best placed to meet those needs.”
Butler adds that he is looking to engage with “like-minded” legal tech companies, AI-first law firms, and legal AI engineers to be part of the Isaacus mission.
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