Isaacus, a legal AI foundation model builder for legal tech companies, has gained $700,000 in pre-seed funding from leading Australian investors Aura Ventures and Galileo Ventures. It aims to provide models that will ‘outperform everything currently in use by legal tech practitioners today’.
(Meanwhile, in other funding news, MarqVision, an AI-powered IP platform, has bagged a Series B funding round of $48m, bringing its total funding to date to $90m. Salesforce Ventures and Y Combinator took part, among others.)
Right, back to Isaacus….The Australian company said that its mission is to provide ‘best-in-class, sovereign, affordable foundational legal AI models’. At the base of Isaacus is what they describe as a ‘massive, proprietary Blackstone Corpus, which covers laws, regulations, cases, and other legal data from the US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, the EU, and the United Nations’. And it’s this that feeds into the building of their legal AI foundation models.
Isaacus is releasing its models directly via a public API, they noted, and stressed that ‘Isaacus is building for legal tech companies first and foremost, but is also consulting with non-legal AI companies as well as law firms and large corporate enterprises with the need for sovereign legal AI capabilities’.
As to the motivation for this, the company, which has been founded by Umar Butler, an Australian data scientist and previously the Assistant Director of Data Science at the Attorney-General’s Department, along with Anthony Butler (Founding Advisor) and Abdur-Rahman Butler (Founding Engineer), said that: ‘Isaacus is working to displace sub-standard, privacy-unfriendly general-purpose AI models that legal tech professionals have found themselves having to rely on.’
They also boldly claimed that: ‘Isaacus will soon be releasing a new generation of legal embedding and generative models designed to outperform everything currently in use by legal tech practitioners today.’
One of the investors, Mark Esterhuizen, Partner at Aura Ventures, commented: ‘Isaacus is building the core AI infrastructure for legal: what AWS became for the cloud, Isaacus aims to be for law. As the wave of legal tech startups grows and wrappers on general-purpose models hit their ceiling, there is a real and urgent need for purpose-built, domain-native systems that understand the nuance and complexity of law.’
Interesting stuff. Do legal tech companies need new, custom-built Legal LLMs, or rather new ‘Small Legal Language Models’? Are the main foundational models hitting a plateau? Well, both questions are open to debate. One thing is for sure, most legal tech companies AL talks to use multiple models, often all at the same time. Adding in additional ones to the mix, perhaps customised to their needs, may improve outcomes. In which case, why not give it a shot?
They add that they are running an industry partnership program and would like to welcome legal tech pioneers to join. You can find more about the company here.
P.S. one example of a recent legally-focused genAI model family they have built is Kanon.
This is a ‘family of small yet highly accurate legal AI models for classifying, extracting information from and assessing the similarity of legal documents, whether they be contracts, cases, legislation, textbooks or anything else.
As of today, the Kanon family includes two models:
Kanon: A high-performance, 317-million-parameter model with a context window of 512 tokens, occupying 1.2 gigabytes.
Kanon Mini: A lightweight Kanon variant with just 136 million parameters, taking up a mere 441 megabytes, enough to run on an iPhone.’
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Legal Innovators Conferences in London and New York – November ’25
If you’d like to stay ahead of the legal AI curve then come along to Legal Innovators New York, Nov 19 + 20 and also, Legal Innovators UK – Nov 4 + 5 + 6, where the brightest minds will be sharing their insights on where we are now and where we are heading.
Legal Innovators UK arrives first, with: Law Firm Day on Nov 4th, then Inhouse Day, on the 5th, and then our new Litigation Day on the 6th.
Both events, as always, are organised by the Cosmonauts team!
Please get in contact with them if you’d like to take part.
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