Summary: ROSS Intelligence aims to speed up its services with an $8.7 million Series A so that it can help legal teams find information faster.
ROSS Intelligence, founded at the University of Toronto in 2015 by Andrew Arruda, Jimoh Ovbiagele and Pargles Dall’Oglio, has improved their ability to help legal teams with the addition of an $8.7 million Series A. iNovia Capital with participation from Y Combinator Continuity Fund, Comcast Ventures Catalyst Fund, Dentons’ NextLaw Labs, and Real Ventures, led the contribution.
With this addition, ROSS will be able to take on Thomson Reuters and LexisNexis as the leader in legal research. ROSS is a legal law platform helping legal teams find details relevant to their cases. The problem is the process of finding results can take days or even weeks through a standard keyword search. ROSS has been trying to improve this by enhancing the keyword search with machine learning so the research process can be sped up and improve the relevancy of the results.
Co-founder and ROSS CEO Andrew Arruda said in an interview with Tech Crunch, “Bluehill benchmarks Lexis’s tech and they are finding 30 percent more relevant info with ROSS in less time.” When starting out ROSS used IBM Watson for some of its natural language processing abilities because the cost of a complete machine learning stack is high. Once the tech startup was able to prove its value and stability, their investors were willing to look at more expensive options. Investor Kai Bond said, “We really spent time looking at the value ROSS was delivering back to law firms. What took a week now takes two to four hours.”
With a combination of deep learning algorithms, ROSS is able to build up a strong artificial intelligence capability. Much of ROSS’s value is tied to its mass of training data. They work with 20 law firms to develop workflow examples and test results with real human feedback.
ROSS originally planned to get to market by selling software catered to certain practice areas at large law firms. They currently offer products in intellectual property and bankruptcy law but are working to expand in other practice areas like labor and employment while trying to serve smaller law firms. A lot of their ability to grow is by utilizing interns and college students who then push their software to their future employers.
iNovia Capital partner and investor in ROSS, Karam Nijjar, said, “The work ROSS is doing with law schools and law students is interesting. As these students enter the workforce, you’re taking someone using an iPhone and handing them a BlackBerry their first day on the job.”
As ROSS expands, it is forced to do so in a legal market heavily riddled with mergers and acquisitions and legal tech service consolidation.
Do you think artificial intelligence software like what ROSS offers is the future for the legal market to keep their costs down while producing faster results? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below.
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