Toronto-based legaltech startup Bench IQhas raised $5.3 million USD ($7.3 million CAD) in seed financing to help expand its artificial intelligence (AI) platform that says it can analyze judicial rulings for lawyers.
Bench IQ said it plans to expand its coverage to US state judges and Canadian judges.
The round closed earlier this year, led by Inovia Capital and Battery Ventures, and included $1 million USD of debt. Other backers included CIBC Innovation Banking, MVP Ventures, Maple VC, and Haystack VC. The startup said this brings its total funding to $7.4 million USD.
Bench IQ’s platform claims to help lawyers prepare for litigation by providing reports and intelligence on judges’ past rulings. CEO Jimoh Ovbiagele told BetaKit that the software compiles information into a “proprietary dataset” made up of legal rulings without written decisions. Ovbiagele said the platform’s intelligence reports highlight patterns in judges’ past ways of approaching cases.
The platform analyzes data from federal court judges in the United States (US). Bench IQ said it plans to expand its coverage to US state judges and Canadian judges, and that it has global ambitions.
Ovbiagele did not divulge Bench IQ’s data sources, saying it’s part of the company’s “secret formula.” However, the company said in a press release that its dataset captures the reasoning behind the significant portion of US judicial rulings that don’t result in a written opinion.
The CEO claimed that this dataset had never before been analyzed and, therefore, its insights cannot be gleaned by commercially available large language models (LLMs) such as OpenAI’s GPT series or Google’s Gemini.