TLDR: Toronto-based legal tech startup Bench IQ Inc. has successfully raised $5.3 million in seed funding. This capital will fuel the development and expansion of its generative artificial intelligence-based judicial intelligence platform, which assists lawyers in understanding judicial behavior and crafting more effective legal strategies. The platform is already utilized by top-tier law firms and aims to revolutionize legal strategy by uncovering insights from previously inaccessible judicial data.
Bench IQ Inc., a two-year-old legal technology startup headquartered in Toronto, announced today the successful closure of a $5.3 million seed funding round. The investment is earmarked for the continued development and market expansion of its innovative AI-based judicial intelligence platform. This cutting-edge technology is designed to provide lawyers with an unprecedented understanding of judicial decision-making, enabling them to refine their legal strategies.
The core offering of Bench IQ is a generative artificial intelligence platform that meticulously analyzes how individual judges have ruled in past cases. Crucially, this includes cases where no written opinions were issued, a segment that constitutes approximately 97% of federal judicial rulings. By leveraging this comprehensive analysis, the platform empowers legal professionals to strategize more effectively on how to present their arguments.
According to Jimoh Ovbiagele, co-founder and CEO of Bench IQ, the company’s platform is already in use by four of the top five firms in the prestigious American Lawyer rankings. Ovbiagele, who previously co-founded another legal tech firm, Ross Intelligence Inc., emphasized the transformative potential of their technology. ‘As AI reshapes law, much of the conversation has focused on first-order gains from automating existing work,’ Ovbiagele stated. ‘The deeper unlock is AI’s ability to enable work that was previously impossible.’
He further clarified the platform’s objective: ‘We’re not trying to predict the outcomes of cases; we’re helping lawyers shape those outcomes.’ To achieve this, Bench IQ developed a proprietary technique to capture and analyze the vast majority of federal judicial rulings that are not formally documented in writing. This unique dataset was then used to train commercial large language models (LLMs) to identify patterns in past statements and rulings, serving as indicators of future judicial tendencies. The company also had to innovate new methods for fine-tuning these LLMs, as ‘No one has written about how to analyze this data on the internet. Large language models don’t know what to do with it — so we had to teach them,’ Ovbiagele explained.
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Bench IQ officially launched its platform in early 2024, with an initial focus solely on the federal judiciary. However, the new funding will support ambitious expansion plans. Ovbiagele highlighted the significant opportunity in state courts, where the number of judges is ‘orders of magnitude larger.’ The company also intends to broaden its data set to encompass state judges and, eventually, common law jurisdictions beyond the United States and Canada. The co-founding team also includes Maxim Isakov and Jeffrey Gettleman.
