jhana.ai Bags Funding To Build An AI-Powered Research & Drafting Tool For Lawyers

Artificial intelligence (AI)-powered legal tech startup jhana.ai has raised $1.6 Mn in its ongoing maiden funding round, led by Freshworks cofounder Girish Mathrubootham’s venture capital firm Together Fund.

The round also saw participation from angel investor Shyamal Anadkat, former VMWare executive Scott Davis, Razorpay cofounders Harshil Mathur and Shashank Kumar, CRED’s Kunal Shah and angel investors Cory Levy and Ojas Shukla.

In a statement, the startup said that “an India portion” of the round is still being closed and will be announced soon. 

The fresh capital will be utilised to develop proprietary datasets and AI models. A portion of the funds will also be deployed to hire researchers across both law and AI domains. 

Founded in 2022 by Em McGlone, Hemanth Bharatha Chakravarthy and Benjamin Hoffner-Brodsky, Bengaluru-based jhana.ai offers an AI-powered legal research and drafting tool for Indian lawyers and law firms. 

Commenting on the fundraise, Together Fund managing partner Manav Garg said, “jhana’s AI-driven paralegal solution has the potential to transform how legal professionals operate, enhancing efficiency and accessibility within the domestic market. We look forward to partnering with the team as they continue to redefine the future of legal support.”

The startup’s AI Paralegal product leverages AI to read files and produce output such as citations, advisories, and memos for lawyers and law firms. Meanwhile, another offering called Document Intelligence reviews documents to flag risks, suggests edits, identifies deviations from standard practice, among others. 

The platform claims to leverage its proprietary 15 Mn+ dataset of case laws and web sources to offer cohesive legal research solutions for its clients. The startup claims that it has been incubated by the likes of Jio GenNext, AWS Public Sector Startup Hub, Microsoft Founders Hub and Google Cloud Startups Program.

The development comes at a time when generative AI (GenAI) has emerged as the flavour of the season. Building on top of large language models from Google and OpenAI, new-age tech startups are leveraging the emerging technology to build new use cases and cater to customers across various domains. 

This has spawned the rise of more than 100+ GenAI startups that call India home. As a result, the AI space has witnessed renewed interest from investors as these homegrown players have raised more than $600 Mn between 2019 and H1 2024. 

Earlier in the day, Myntra and Cultfit founder Mukesh Bansal’s AI startup Nurix AI bagged $27.5 Mn in its seed funding round from Accel and General Catalyst. On the same day, BharatGPT maker CoRover also bagged $4 Mn in its Series A funding round led by Venture Catalysts to scale up its conversational AI chatbots.