The tidal wave of legaltech investment and acquisitions has continued into the second month of 2025, with a strong emphasis on agentic AI startups. Here’s what you need to know.
UK and EMEA
Mishcon de Reya has made a pre-seed investment in Ctrl AI, which enables enterprises to leverage agentic AI to handle data intensive and high volume tasks such as disputes and real estate services. The investment sees the Mishcon-incepted company spun out on its own. Ctrl AI was co-founded by Anup Kollanethu, previously a strategic adviser at Mishcon, a former legal ops head at EY, and a former CEO of DWF Managed Services; and Nicky Pearson, who has held senior global ops roles at the likes of Freshfield Bruckhaus Deringer.
This investment marks the second time Mishcon de Reya has backed a company that has been incepted within the firm after Kato, a commercial leasing platform co-founded by real estate partner Nick Kirby.
Kollanethu (pictured above) said: “Our goal is to equip enterprise legal departments and their stakeholders in operations with tools that fundamentally improve their day-to-day operations. Mishcon’s investment validates our vision and supports our pursuit of building solutions that deliver measurable value, speed, and clarity to in-house teams navigating complex legal landscapes.”
North America
San Francisco
Eudia, an augmented intelligence platform for Fortune 500 legal teams, officially launched on 13 February, simultaneously announcing the close of its Series A funding round for up to $105 million, led by General Catalyst with participation from Floodgate, Sierra Ventures, Hakluyt Capital, Defy, Everywhere Ventures, B3 Capital, Backbone, Firsthand, as well as angel investors Gokul Rajaram, Chris Re, Andrew Sieja, Mike Gamson, and Scott Belsky.
Eudia has been operating in stealth for the past 18 months. Its agentic AI platform ingests proprietary data and automates routine tasks within an enterprise’s workflow.
“Visionary CLOs see AI’s potential but understand they cannot compromise on trust, accuracy, or a deep understanding of their organization’s unique context,” said Omar Haroun (pictured below), co-founder and CEO of Eudia. “Eudia combines a proprietary augmented intelligence platform with human expertise to supercharge legal professionals, helping organizations scale efficiently, mitigate risk effectively, and unlock billions in unrealized business value.”
Eudia’s solutions are being used by the CLOs of some of the world’s most prominent Fortune 500 companies, including Cargill, DHL, Duracell, and Coherent.
Mark Smolik, chief legal officer of DHL Supply Chain Americas, said: “As a team we spend a great deal of time evaluating and implementing new and creative ways to drive innovation in our department. Of the many tools we’ve evaluated, Eudia stands out as highly differentiated, by building AI agents that are designed for the real needs of corporate legal departments. The team have earned my trust with every interaction, and I’m thrilled to have access to Eudia’s Augmented Intelligence platform.”
Eudia’s leadership team is comprised of Haroun, who previously led AI strategy at Relativity; Ashish Agrawal, CTO, who has held builder and leadership roles at Amazon, Apple, Google, and startups, including Cresta; David Van Reyk , COO, former private equity investor at CVC Capital Partners.SpotDraft, the CLM platform that helps in-house legal teams manage their contract ecosystems, has raised $54 million in Series B funding. Vertex Growth Singapore and Trident Partners were the lead investors, the existing investors (Xeed VC, Arkam Ventures, Prosus Ventures, and Premji Invest) have also participated in this round.
San Francisco
SpotDraft, an AI-driven contract lifecycle management (CLM) platform built for in-house legal teams, on 12 February announced that it has raised $54m in Series B funding. The tool manages all aspects of contracting, including AI-assisted redlining, e-signatures, intelligent contract repository, third-party papers and clickwrap agreements.
SpotDraft’s CLM platform is used by customers such as Crunchbase. Jonathan Franz, head of legal at Crunchbase, said: “It is easy to implement and gives us the confidence we need to manage reviews, automate high-volume contracts, close deals faster and navigate diligence.”
SpotDraft, which has launched products like VerifAI and ClickThrough, has over 250 employees across its offices in Bengaluru and New York. The company was co-founded in 2017 by New York lawyer Shashank Bijapur and Madhav Bhagat, alumnus of Carnegie Mellon. The leadership team also includes Rohith Salim, Madhav’s batchmate at Carnegie Mellon who is chief product officer and most recently, Akshay Verma, legal industry veteran, ex-Meta and Coinbase who is chief operating officer.
SpotDraft raised $26M in its Series A round of funding in March 2023. “We see potential in SpotDraft being the first in class CLM solution globally,” said James Lee, managing partner at Vertex Growth.
To learn more about SpotDraft, visit www.SpotDraft.com.
Miami, Florida
Fuel Venture Capital has invested in the $4.5m pre-seed round of Aracor AI, a legal AI startup founded by attorney and technologist Katya Fisher (pictured below). Aracor combines AI and human review to automate processes such as M&A, due diligence, contract negotiation and review, and compliance.
Fuel Venture was founded by Maggie Vo and the company says that this investment is not just about funding but about championing diversity in tech and innovation. According to Harvard Business Review, companies founded solely by women receive less than 3% of all venture capital investments, and women account for less than 15% of check-writers.
“As a female general partner, it’s deeply meaningful to support a passionate and forward-thinking female CEO and co-founder like Katya Fisher, cheering her and bringing her vision to life – even when the whole world might not fully see it yet,” said Vo.
The new funding will be used to enhance product development, expand market research and scale operations.