Bench IQ, an AI-powered judicial intelligence platform, led by former ROSS co-founder Jimoh Ovbiagele, has raised a $5.3m* Seed round. It follows a $2.1m pre-seed raise in 2024.
The new funding will fuel Bench IQ’s growth, with a focus on expanding its proprietary dataset, advancing its AI agents, and expanding the team in the US and Canada, they said.
They noted that guessing what a judge will say using related data is vital as ‘in the US written opinions accompany only about 3% of rulings, leaving traditional case law platforms blind to the vast majority of judicial decision-making’.
Whereas ‘Bench IQ has built a proprietary dataset capturing their reasoning’, they added. Bench IQ ‘aggregates and analyzes proprietary judicial data, using AI agents to identify patterns in judges’ reasoning and provide actionable insights for litigation strategy’, they explained.
In a complex bankruptcy auction, Bench IQ can pinpoint when and why a presiding judge has approved above-market deal protections, guiding attorneys toward a winning request, they added.
The founders also include Maxim Isakov, ROSS’s founding engineer and a former partner from Kirkland & Ellis, Jeffrey Gentleman.
Ovbiagele, Bench IQ Co-Founder and CEO, commented: ‘With Bench IQ, litigators gain judicial intelligence – the ability to understand how presiding judges think, enabling them to craft smarter strategies and deliver better results clients will pay for.’
(* Note: not clear if that is US or Can $)
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