By Tanguy Chau (co-founder, CEO) and Mike Ulin (co-founder, CTO)
Generative AI breakthroughs are poised to transform the practice of law and compliance. The average lawyer spends one-fifth of their time conducting legal research, according to the American Bar Association. It’s complex, time-consuming, and tedious work. In addition, laws and regulations are constantly changing, which makes it challenging for practitioners to stay up-to-date.
To transform the legal research and composition process, we’ve raised a $6M seed round to speed development of Paxton. Our round is led by WVV Capital, with significant participation from Kyber Knight and 25Madison. Additional investors in this round include Andrew Ng's AI Fund, Voyager Capital, Gaingels, Plug and Play Technology Center, Identity Ventures, and Dick Parsons, the former Chairman of Citi. Unlike its competitors, Paxton has three distinct advantages designed with lawyers in mind.
First, Paxton was designed from the ground up to ensure it will not hallucinate– it cannot provide nonexistent cases, unlike other services that rely on OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Second, Paxton provides clear and accurate citations for every claim it generates, so practitioners can verify its outputs. Third, Paxton allows practitioners to go beyond publicly available information: our users can upload their own research and documents to Paxton for analysis. In addition, Paxton’s database is updated in real-time, and tracks every US Federal & State law, rule, regulation, and guidance.
Paxton leverages natural language processing and machine learning to comprehend intricate legal concepts, conduct thorough research, and produce intelligently analyzed first drafts. Paxton not only streamlines the research process but also ensures the accuracy and verifiability of outputs, allowing legal professionals to vet and ultimately trust its work.
Since we first unveiled Paxton in July, we’ve already seen exciting adoption from our early users which span in-house legal teams to large firms. With this funding, we’re going to invest in go-to-market so that our technology can reach all of the legal professionals and businesses that want to offload tedious work and focus on what matters.
"We are tremendously excited to be part of the Paxton journey," says Jason Franklin, Managing Director at WVV Capital, "Paxton is set to transform the way legal professionals work. Its potential to significantly cut down research time while enhancing accuracy is precisely why we've chosen to invest."
Paxton complies with SOC2 requirements (attestation pending) and follows American Bar Association’s guidelines on legal AI. It can be deployed behind a firm firewall, with options to isolate data access by practice group or matter.
We’ve been thrilled to see the creativity coming from our customers and the broad range of use cases that our platform is used for. Professionals rely on Paxton for drafting memos, writing training materials, creating policies and procedures, researching regulations, auditing and comparing legal documents, and providing feedback on regulatory matters. This is just the beginning.
By automating this important yet time consuming part of the job, we’re on a mission to empower legal professionals so that they can focus on strategic thinking, high-value tasks, and client relationships. We hope that by bringing transparency, speed, and efficiency to an industry that’s often slow moving and opaque, the industry will change for the better. If you’re interested in trying the product, sign up here and try Paxton free of charge.
About the Paxton AI Team
Tanguy Chau earned his Engineering Ph.D. and M.B.A. from M.I.T., where he also served as a Trustee to the M.I.T. Corporation. Before founding Paxton AI, Tanguy spent seven years as a Silicon Valley venture capitalist with Formation 8 and Mayfield Fund, served as the Chief Compliance Officer for a FINRA and SEC-regulated investment advisory firm, and was an engagement manager at McKinsey & Company.
Michael Ulin is an accomplished leader in artificial intelligence. Before founding Paxton AI, Michael was the founding engineer and VP of AI for ZestyAI, an AI-focused property-insurance risk assessment company and one of CB Insights’ Top 100 AI startups and Top 50 Insurtech startups. He has developed new product recommendation algorithms, built machine learning models to identify valuable technology patents at RPX, advised Fortune 500 companies at McKinsey & Co., and worked in the policy group at the Federal Reserve. He also held regulatory affairs positions at Cox Communications and Iberdrola S.A.
