Today, Isaacus completed its pre-seed round, raising $700k from leading Australian tech VCs Aura Ventures and Galileo Ventures. This represents the first VC-backed investment into foundational legal AI research and development worldwide, as well as one of the first investments into Australian-made sovereign AI.
As we leverage our investment to execute one of the most disruptive legal AI missions of the decade, we’re sharing this primer on who we are, what our vision is for the future of legal AI, and how we plan on powering the next generation of legal tech firms.
We’re calling on like-minded, forward-thinking legal tech companies, law firms, and engineers to join us on this journey, either as early design partners or as founding members of our fast-moving, nimble team of domain experts.
If you’d like to stay updated on our progress, including the upcoming release of our legal embedding model and legal grounding API, you can also follow us on LinkedIn or join r/isaacus.
The team
Established early this year, the Isaacus team consists of Umar Butler, his brother Abdur-Rahman Butler, and his father Anthony Butler.
Umar Butler, the founder and CEO of Isaacus, is an internationally recognized legal AI expert. His most well-known works include the Open Australian Legal Corpus, the first open LLMs for Australian law, and semchunk. Previously, he was the Assistant Director of Data Science at the Attorney-General’s Department, where he was responsible for overseeing all the Department’s national-level AI projects. His formal qualifications are in law, holding a Bachelor of Laws (Honours) from La Trobe University.
Abdur-Rahman Butler, a Founding Engineer at Isaacus, is an economist by education and data scientist by trade. He is an author of the soon-to-be Massive Legal Embedding Benchmark (MLEB). He completed a Master of Economics at Monash University this year, receiving the Dean’s Unit Prize for Applied Microeconomics upon graduation.
Anthony Butler, a Founding Advisor at Isaacus, is a world expert in AI, fintech, and cybersecurity. He has served as CTO of IBM MEA, an IBM Distinguished Engineer, and a Senior Advisor to the Saudi Central Bank. He is currently also Chief Architect of Humain, Saudi Arabia’s sovereign AI company, and an advisory board member of Chainlink and Rilian Technologies.
Together, the Isaacus team combines advanced knowledge of AI and data science with deep expertise in law and regulation, spanning 35 years of industry experience across three countries.
Our vision
Unlike the handful of other foundational legal AI companies that have sprung up and disappeared over the past few years, Isaacus is uniquely focused on serving the data and AI needs of the legal tech industry.
This focus on the legal tech industry over the legal industry is deliberate and is informed by a broader thesis and vision for the future of law.
In a nutshell, we see legal tech firms as the law firms of the future.
Indeed, law firms have already begun to outsource some of the most quintessentially ‘legal’ of their legal services to legal tech companies, including drafting contracts, 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.
This trend is only likely to continue as consumers and enterprises alike increasingly subvert traditional channels of legal service delivery in favor of AI-first legal tech firms.
We thus 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 commercialized legal knowledge bases, starkly differentiating themselves from both newcomers and unreformed incumbents.
Our conviction is that this emerging market of next-generation legal tech companies and forward-thinking law firms has not yet been recognized as an industry of its own, one that is worth having solutions tailored to its many unique pain points.
Given our deep experience and expertise in this area, we believe we are best placed to meet those needs.
Our mission
From our engagement with and direct experience working in the legal tech industry, we’ve become acutely aware of the need for legal AI and data solutions that are genuinely fit for purpose, not what outsiders think is fit for purpose.
The industry’s pain points tend to revolve more around information than anything else.
Legal tech professionals are sick of having to independently maintain their own up-to-date copies of legislation, regulations, and cases from around the world. General-domain grounding and search APIs do not cut it for them when they have no guarantee of point-in-time accuracy, let alone freshness.
They’re likewise tired of having to build their own end-to-end legal document parsing pipelines capable of transforming a scanned PDF of a regulation into a beautifully formatted schematized object. This is not to mention maintaining vector databases of legal documents and keeping up with the latest innovations in embeddings and information retrieval to ensure the most relevant information is surfaced every time.
Our core mission is to solve every one of the common AI- and data-related pain points of the legal tech industry, whether by delivering superior legal research capabilities that cut far above and beyond those of general-domain retrieval models or by providing direct access to enormous amounts of high-quality legal data from the Blackstone Corpus, our proprietary, living, multijurisdictional repository of legal knowledge.
Eventually, we see ourselves becoming the legal data and AI infrastructure that powers all the world’s leading legal tech solutions.
In furtherance of this mission, we’ve already managed to build semchunk, the world’s most popular semantic chunking algorithm, downloaded over 700k times a month and used by Microsoft, IBM, and The World Bank, as well as the Open Australian Legal Corpus, the first and only open database of Australian law, used by researchers at the University of Melbourne, University of Sydney, and Monash University. We’ve also managed to release the only legal-domain reranking, information extraction, and classification models on the market and in production today.
With this latest round of investment now complete, we’ll be accelerating our progress by soon releasing the world’s first benchmark for legal embedding models, the world’s best legal embedding model, the world’s first legal grounding API, and many more first-of-a-kind legal AI solutions yet to be revealed.
We’re thus encouraging like-minded, forward-thinking legal tech companies, law firms, and engineers to reach out and join us on our journey, whether as a strategic partner or member of our founding team.
You can also follow us on LinkedIn or join r/isaacus to get updates on our progress, including upcoming models and APIs.
