Legal services are essential to doing business, but for many companies, they’re expensive, inconsistent and hard to access. Genie AI set out to change that.
Co-founded by Nitish Mutha and Rafie Faruq while at UCL, Genie AI uses AI agents to help users draft, review and negotiate legal documents on their own terms.
The product has come a long way from its early focus on law firms; today, it’s a self-serve platform used by more than 130,000 businesses and backed by top-tier investors including Khosla Ventures and Google Ventures.
In this week’s Behind the Idea, we speak to Mutha about what inspired the shift from software engineer to legal tech founder, how Genie AI is rethinking the way legal work gets done and what’s next for the platform.
Tell us more about your company and its offering
Genie AI aims to provide anyone in business the ability to draft, review and negotiate legal agreements independently. We have AI agents that handle complex legal work on the user’s behalf, significantly lowering the barrier to entry for working with legal documents.
What problem was your company set up to solve?
Access to legal services is unfair. People with deep pockets can afford the best possible lawyer support to conduct business, yet every business on the planet must interface with legal agreements to operate. There’s often no clear measure of quality for legal services provided. Businesses frequently pay large fees for billable hours rather than paying for the actual work completed.
Since launch, how has your company evolved?
Throughout our journey, we’ve made mistakes, gathered valuable learnings and evolved significantly in the process. In the early days, we focused on big law firms to build an AI product that would help draft legal agreements better and faster. However, we learned that we were just a cog in a system that is old and slow, limiting our ability to make a major industry impact. We then pivoted our business to focus on end users, empowering self-serve legal services with AI assistance.
This year, we’ve matured our core technology by building a rich, robust AI-native editor that enables our AI agents to directly modify documents on your behalf while keeping you in the loop to approve suggested changes, which is a massive technological advancements to deliver advanced solutions to our customers. We’ve also built a diverse, talented team that is highly motivated to transform the legal industry.
What has been the biggest challenge or most ‘tricky moment’ to overcome?
We’ve intentionally positioned our product and business broadly, attracting users from various business backgrounds. This has created challenges in ensuring we provide high-quality service that works and proves useful for everyone. Additionally, now that AI capabilities are commonly available, it’s become even more challenging to innovate and differentiate our product solution among other providers.
What are your biggest achievements or ‘proudest moment’ so far?
We’ve built an agentic legal document editor that has scaled to serve 130,000+ trusted companies. We raised $20million from Khosla Ventures and Google Ventures well before we started generating revenue. We won the ‘Best Place To Work’ award by The Sunday Times in the startups category, frequently ranked amongst top AI startup companies to watch for in Legal space.
How would you describe the culture of your company?
We’re highly motivated, ambitious individuals who believe in taking risks and pushing the boundaries of innovation. We believe each individual has an equal voice and encourage every team member to be proactive, self-managed, and as autonomous as possible. We foster continuous improvement and learning while ensuring people are challenged to bring out their best.
What’s in store for the future?
The future is limitless. We aim to provide fully autonomous legal AI agents to businesses that not only handle complex legal tasks but also perform complex legal workflows, learn about your company, and provide personalised service.
