We're excited to announce our $250,000 pre-seed investment in Isaacus, co-leading their $700k round alongside Aura Ventures.

The Legal Industry is in a phase of growing adoption and transformation due to AI. Isaacus saw the need to go deeper to build a model trained against a true corpus, the BlackStone Corpus. 

We see the trend to be moving towards who will own the models that access and improve the Corpus for each vertical. With an increasing usage of a number of things; research and document drafting, legal research, document drafting, and firm operations, the place to be is at the nexus of the information.

Isaacus will be the backbone of the AI Legal infrastructure with sovereign legal models and tools to enable even the larger players to expand their capabilities.

Why We Care and Why We Decided to Back Umar Butler

Umar has the quality we deeply love at Galileo Ventures, technical prowess paired with deep domain expertise. We knew from our first call this was a check we all wanted to write. When speaking with Umar you can just see his mind come to life with the ways in which he can empower and support the legal industry with AI. 

Umar started programming around the age of eight, creating web browsers in Visual Basic. By ten, he was modding Tamagotchis and coding his own homebrew Nintendo DS games. His passion for coding and the deeply complex problems has never stopped. Paired with his deep passion for debating, whether it was debating with teachers, parents, or friends, law seemed like a natural fit. He wanted to learn something new, and was particularly interested in how law could be approached from the perspective of a coder. Umar decided to pair law with the most technically challenging, AI - artificial intelligence. 

Early into his law degree, he started tinkering on the side with classical natural language processing techniques like named entity recognition, part-of-speech tagging, word embeddings, and classification for anything ranging from parsing old Arabic historical texts all the way to deconstructing linguistic dependencies in legislative provisions.

That side interest eventually led to his publishing a report with the Islamic Council of Victoria using a specially trained AI model to identify anti-Muslim hate speech on Twitter. His report garnered considerable media attention and was eventually cited by the Australian Human Rights Commission.

By the end of his degree, after seeing how technologically behind the legal industry was (particularly relative to what heI knew was possible), and after having thoroughly enjoyed using AI for policy and legal analysis, he realised that his interests lie principally at the intersection of technology and AI and that a career in legal tech would be most likely to fit those interests.

“Umar is the kind of founder that is a joy to partner with, his ability to think deeply and technically with unique domain expertise creates the ultimate trifecta we look for.” – Hugh Stephens, GP Galileo Ventures

Why We Think Isaacus is Designed for Longevity

The creation of The Blackstone Corpus is one of the world's largest proprietary repositories of legal data, covering legislation, cases, regulations, contracts, books and journal articles from around the world. 

For every model they  train, they often end up significantly increasing the size of the corpus. And as it continues to grow in size, they are observing a consistent improvement in the quality and breadth of their models. 

The thinking that Umar and his team have around the industry is at its core what we look for that belief in something greater, the deep domain expertise of how to build something that others want to and will use and how to be forward thinking in partnering to create a vast market. 

“We are bullish on AI and Isaacus has all of the things we look for; from deep technical know-how to domain expertise that is lived. We feel privileged to partner with them as they begin their journey,”  Said Julia French, Partner, Galileo Ventures

Why We Believe Isaacus will Reshape the Legal AI Market

We expect Isaacus to be quite disruptive to the businesses of both general-domain AI model builders as well as legal data brokers. The release of their embedding model, in particular, which despite currently being in training right now, has already outperformed the world's best general-domain embedding model. It will demonstrate the power of efficient specialized, domain-specific LLMs over general-purpose LLMs, leading general-domain AI model builders to rush to offer their own specialised models.

In addition to disrupting the business of incumbents, We also expect the release of the embedding model to trigger an overall rise in the retrieval quality of legal AI solutions and a corresponding decline in legal hallucinations owing to better factual grounding, with those material accuracy gains flowing on to enterprises and general consumers.

Where Will AI Take Legal Practice?

We think that AI-enabled legal tech firms will evolve into the law firms of the future.

Law firms have already begun to outsource some of the most ‘legal’ of their legal services to legal tech companies, from drafting contracts to researching case law and managing and evaluating risk.

There are some markets where legal tech companies are now directly competing with law firms by offering their own legal services to consumers. Those services may not yet be law-firm-grade, but that doesn’t matter to consumers who cannot otherwise afford to retain a top-tier law firm.

We see this trend as only continuing as consumers and enterprises alike increasingly subvert traditional channels of legal service delivery in favour of AI-first legal tech firms.

We anticipate continued, if not greater, growth and investment into consumer- and enterprise-facing legal tech companies.

Simultaneously, we expect a select number of forward-thinking law firms to begin leveraging AI to transform their siloed yet immensely valuable legal expertise into commercialised legal knowledge bases, starkly differentiating themselves from both newcomers and unreformed incumbents.

We are wildly excited about Isaacus and their future.

Join us in welcoming them to Galileo Ventures.

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