Swedish startup Leya AB has raised $25 million in Series A funding as it sets about transforming the legal services industry with its dedicated artificial intelligence tools that help guide users through intricacies of law.

Today’s round was led by Redpoint Ventures and saw participation from a host of others prominent Silicon Valley-based venture capital firms, including Benchmark, Y Combinator, Wayfinder Ventures and Alt Capital.

Leya has set itself the mission of relieving lawyers from the countless hours they spend chained to their desks, performing manual and repetitive tasks relating to things like legal research. It has built a dedicated AI assistant that leverages large language models to help lawyers in numerous ways, helping them navigate the masses of legal texts they’re forced to wade through every single day.

The startup has created what it likes to call an “AI-powered legal workspace” that integrates with law firms’ documents, playbooks, templates and external legal content. It’s designed to assist lawyers in everything from reviewing, searching and drafting, filling in transaction checklists, creating key term reports and writing memos. It helps legal professionals to perform such mundane tasks much faster, freeing them to focus on higher value work.

The AI assistant enables lawyers to quickly find answers by using natural language, so they can ask about legal precedents relating to a case they’re working on, or request a summary of the EU’s new AI Act.

Leya’s AI assistant directly accesses files and documents and combines them with legal data, such as EU legal databases, regulations, case law and authority information from over 15 jurisdictions. It then provides citations and references from the material, including due diligence reviews and conversations.

The company is notably agnostic over which LLMs it uses. Its platform is hosted on Microsoft Corp.’s Azure cloud platform and uses LLMs such as Meta Platforms Inc.’s LLaMA 3 and OpenAI’s GPT-4o.

To date, Leya has signed up more than 70 customers, including law firms and in-house legal teams within large organizations. Its customer base spans European countries such as the U.K., Spain, France, Portugal, the Netherlands and the Nordics.

One of Leya’s most prominent customers is the Swedish legal firm Hansen Advokatbyrå KB, which specializes in corporate law, handling matters such as mergers and acquisitions, investments and management advisory on behalf of business clients. In a blog post, the company said that Hansen hired Leya as its AI colleague, giving its legal staff an immediate productivity boost.

Hansen Senior Associate Josefin Högsander revealed Leya had a significant impact, reducing the time its employees spend on tasks such as information gathering, reviewing documents and writing drafts.

“Leya is also helping us in our mission to humanize business law, by making us move towards more plain language,” Högsander said. As a result, the company’s lawyers have more time to spend on providing advisory services to clients and building relationships.

Leya co-founder Max Junestrand said his company is dedicated to enhancing legal productivity. “We’ve been driven by a more delightful, AI-powered way of working in the legal business, and this funding allows us to accelerate even faster, coming off the back of our previous round just two months ago,” he said, referring to Leya’s $10.5 million seed round in May.

Looking forward, Leya said it’s planning to accelerate product development. It recently entered the U.K. legal market for the first time and is now looking to expand to more European countries.

Photo: Leya AB