Edinburgh-headquartered legal intelligence startup Wordsmith AI has secured a $25m Series A led by Index Ventures to scale its AI infrastructure and expand its legal agents business. The company, which raised $5m in seed funding last June, say that with AI transforming the legal profession and giving rise to entirely new roles like the ‘legal engineer’, Wordsmith is embedding fleets of AI agents into corporations and training teams to wield them.
Founded by lawyer-turned-engineer Ross McNairn in 2024, Wordsmith AI helps in-house teams with the likes of contract review, highlighting risk, summarising contracts, extracting key terms. The young company has reached $100m valuation – which it says is the fastest ever for a Scottish startup – and is set to open London and New York offices later this year. McNairn said: “For the first time, AI infrastructure can be embedded across companies, with fleets of agents that you can train to support every corporate function – cutting deal cycles, answering queries, and processing complex workflows. Our Legal Enablement Platform is like air traffic control for GCs and in-house teams, helping them guide teams to the right decisions faster.”
Wordsmith AI’s customer base includes Trustpilot, Remote.com, Deliveroo, Multiverse, and Docplanner.
McNairn, who has held previous senior product roles at Skyscanner, letgo and TravelPerk, adds: “We are helping GCs embed their legal intelligence across the business. Gone are the days of legal being seen as a blocker, it is now a revenue accelerator.”
To support this shift, Wordsmith is investing significantly in training and upskilling legal professionals. McNairn says: “We’re witnessing the birth of an entirely new role in legal: the legal engineer. These are the people training, deploying, and managing fleets of AI agents. We’re helping to re-skill an entire generation to do it.”
Wordsmith has also raised from Scottish Enterprise, Scotland’s national economic development agency, and McNairn said: “While we are the fastest-ever Scottish startup to reach a valuation of over $100 million, what’s more important is that we’re scaling a technology company from a base in Scotland that will in itself help to build an AI ecosystem here.”