My big idea: Genie AI

‍Hi Rafie! What's your elevator pitch?

Genie AI is the world’s most advanced legal AI Agent aimed at business professionals and in-house lawyers in businesses. We want to build the autonomous legal departments for the future AI companies and this will give every company access to world class legal services at a fraction of the cost. 

Why does the market need it?

The aim for Genie is to significantly transform the legal industry on a global scale, ensuring global commerce happens more efficiently and all businesses can access legal services at a reasonable price.

Where is the business today?

We have over 130,000 companies using us all over the world, including the UK, US, Europe and in Asia, and over 250 companies join the platform every day as we become the world’s trusted platform to do business and legal transactions. 

Recent achievements include our significant investment rounds with Google Ventures and Khosla Ventures for $20 million - particularly given Khosla Venture’s early investment in OpenAI which gives us real pedigree in terms of AI access. I’ve actually just returned from the Khosla CEO Summit. 

Other recent milestones are Genie surpassing 100,000 companies as users, and the creation of over 150,000 drafted documents. 

Being selected for a government trade mission representing the Ministry of Justice in New York and Chicago earlier this year, and Genie being named a Sunday Times ‘Best place to work’ are also achievements as we were the only AI small business included on the list.

What made you think there was money in this?

There isn’t one single point which lets you know there is money in a business, but you need a mechanism to obtain continuous feedback. The feedback you obtain becomes more and more positive over time and this is the evidence of a businesses commercial viability. 

In terms of how I started, my Co Founder Nitish and I started on our MSc in Machine Learning (AI) courses at UCL and were lucky enough to be taught by Google DeepMind. I also wrote my thesis on Generative AI eight years ago in 2017 a couple of years before the first GPT model was released, specifically on generating text which was most applicable to legal contracts. I recognised the biggest social and ethical impact we could have with those algorithms was with legal documents - the lifeblood of human and business relationships. 

What's your biggest strength?

Our biggest strength is that because we built the proprietary legal editor in the browser, we’ve been able to acquire over 150,000 docs and over 5 million clause revisions, and this data gives us a unique and unfair advantage of drafting the best legal contracts.

What is the secret to making the business work?

The secret is hiring the best people and then being rigorously honest with each at all times. 

The best mistakes I made were hiring mistakes. The company you make is the team you hire, and in the past I made the mistake of not being vigorous enough when hiring. We’ve changed that now and try to meet everyone in person wherever possible with multiple stages of interview. So in that way, those mistakes have enabled us to strengthen our process substantially.

How do you market the company?

Every company has its own marketing channels. We are a product led company so our marketing is mostly through Google, SEO, social media. People search for how to create contracts through ChatGPT or Google and then we are recommended essentially.

What funding do you have? Is it enough?

It’s never enough! But we have runway for the next two years and are able to invest in Agentic AI and global expansion which are our key areas.

Tell us about the business model

It's fairly simple. We are trying to get the legal industry to charge by value, not by time spent, and so we are an annual or monthly subscription based on the number of documents drafted. 

What were you doing before?

After university, where I studied Philosophy and Economics at the London School of Economics, I worked by day for a Japanese investment bank as a bond and derivatives trader, and by night, created my first business with my flatmate: a viral charity donation company that accrued 10,000 users and provided £50,000 in donations. That experience working in finance and trading, economics and a previous tech startup have all taught me skills I can cross fertilise those learnings into law. I’ve also got that lived experience of working in high pressure environments so being a founder comes as a natural continuation.

What is the future vision?

Building the autonomous legal departments for the future AI companies, giving every company access to world class legal services at a fraction of the cost. Our biggest strength is that because we built the proprietary legal editor in the browser, we’ve been able to acquire over 150,000 docs and over 5 million clause revisions, and this data gives us a unique and unfair advantage of drafting the best legal contracts.

AI is going to fully automate the legal departments of the future but companies are not yet set up for that so we need to transition lawyers to the new world, and that could be a challenging process but I think we can do it in a way that maintains jobs and increases the work output massively.