US AI-powered hybrid corporate law firm start-up Athena has secured $2.5m in a pre-seed funding round.
Co-founded in August by former Legora employees Cem Ucan and Kieran John Keenan, Athena uses proprietary AI agents to quickly draft and prepare complex transaction documents, working alongside experienced lawyers at its affiliated law firm.
The financing was led by a16z Speedrun, Andreessen Horowitz’s 12-week accelerator programme for early-stage technology investments.
The San Francisco-based start-up will use the funding to grow its commercial real estate transactions business and expand across property types, geographies and other areas of transactional law.
Ucan, CEO of Athena, said: “Most legal AI companies sell tools to traditional law firms. We took a different approach. Our AI works hand-in-hand with a law firm designed around it from day one, with experienced attorneys focused on the judgement and negotiation that actually move deals forward.”
Keenan, Athena’s CTO, said: “I measure our progress by how quickly an attorney can review an AI agent’s work and confidently stand behind it. A draft produced in minutes can still leave a lawyer with hours of work. Making that review more efficient is how our platform helps us deliver faster legal services with the quality clients expect from Big Law.”
Troy Kirwin, partner at a16z Speedrun, said that clients will still want “experienced professionals” to take responsibility for legal tasks even as AI becomes more capable.
He added: “Athena is building around that need, with a system that can improve through real legal work and a team obsessed with scaling fast.”
The start-up says that its affiliated law firm charges a fixed fee per transaction, which it claims can save clients up to half when compared to billable hour work for the same type of deal.
Over the first six weeks since the platform became operational, Athena says that lawyer review time has been cut by 70%, as lawyer corrections and client preferences are fed back in to improve the platform.
Prior to co-founding Athena, Ucan was a legal engineer at Legora for almost two years, and spent more than seven years at law firm Baker McKenzie, where latterly he was innovation product manager.
Keenan was a member of the technical staff at Legora for just over 18 months. Prior to that he was a founder at Oslo-based legal AI developer Nemoest.
The legaltech market has seen a wave of investment this year. Last month US mass action legaltech start-up Chariot Claims secured $10m in a Series A funding round, amid a rise in mass action and arbitration activity in the US.
And in September, UK-based AI governance intelligence platform start-up AI Score – which was co-founded last year by former White & Case associate Benita Tibb – raised $5.4m in seed funding to accelerate its go-to-market strategy.
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