August Secures $7M to Deliver Configurable Legal AI to Midsize Firms
In a significant boost for the burgeoning legal technology sector, August, an innovative AI platform tailored for midsize law firms, has successfully closed a $7 million seed funding round. This investment, led by prominent venture capital firms NEA and Pear VC, signals a strong belief in August’s mission to bring configurable artificial intelligence solutions to a historically underserved segment of the legal market.
Founded in 2023 by Rutvik Rau, Thomas Bueler-Faudree, and Joseph Parker—a team with diverse backgrounds spanning AI, legal practice, and enterprise technology who met at Columbia University’s ML research lab—August aims to revolutionize how midsize law firms operate. The company’s core offering is a modular AI agent orchestration framework designed to closely emulate attorney thought processes, ensuring high accuracy and traceability in legal work. This configurable platform allows firms to customize AI workflows to their specific tasks and regional legal requirements, addressing critical needs in areas like contract review, due diligence, discovery preparation, and drafting. Importantly, August’s deployments can run securely behind a firm’s internal firewalls, addressing paramount concerns around data residency and confidentiality in the legal profession.
The funding round saw strategic participation from leading law schools, Afore Capital, and a notable roster of angel investors, including Gokul Rajaram, Geoff Charles (Chief Product Officer at Ramp), David Azose (Head of Engineering at OpenAI), and Kevin Zhang (Partner at Bain Capital Ventures). This diverse backing underscores the broad confidence in August’s approach and its potential to reshape legal services. NEA, a global venture capital firm with over $27 billion in assets under management, and Pear VC, an AI-first pre-seed and seed firm, bring significant expertise and resources to August’s growth trajectory. NEA’s previous substantial investment in Clio, another leader in legal software, highlights their strategic interest in driving innovation within legal technology.
Midsize law firms, comprising over 50,000 practices worldwide and employing half a million lawyers, represent a vast yet often overlooked market segment. These firms frequently grapple with technology fragmentation, limited in-house IT support, and the challenge of integrating disparate tools. August’s integrated platform seeks to consolidate multiple functions, offering a cohesive solution that mitigates these operational hurdles. The company reports that early adopters have already witnessed substantial impact, with some firms completing document review cycles 80% faster and others, like Australian firm Hicksons, reviewing 5,000 negligence files 90% faster. This efficiency allows legal professionals to shift focus from routine, document-heavy tasks to more strategic client counseling, potentially enabling firms to embrace alternative or flat-fee billing models.
The investment arrives at a pivotal time when AI adoption in the legal industry is accelerating. Recent data indicates that midsize firms are, in fact, outpacing smaller firms in AI adoption, largely due to their capacity for greater resource allocation towards implementation. This trend validates August’s targeted strategy, as the legal landscape increasingly demands integrated, ethical, and compliant AI solutions. The newly secured capital will be channeled into expanding August’s modular AI agent offerings, enhancing personalized onboarding support, and bolstering its engineering, legal, product, and sales teams. The company also plans to deepen its presence in international markets, including India, further extending the reach of its configurable legal AI.