Della closes $2.5M seed funding round to transform legal review 

Della, the legal technology startup shaping the future of legal review, has raised $2.5 million from new and existing investors, after closing its first seed funding round. New investor Pragmatech Ventures joins Thibault Poutrel, Frederic Montagnon and other international investors, who have supported Della since its launch. 

The funds will be used to grow Della’s presence in Europe and the USA, and enhance its unique AI capabilities, which make the process of reviewing both simple and complex legal documents faster, more accurate and efficient. Della’s platform launched in January 2020 and is being used by small and large law firms across multiple countries, including Mishcon de Reya LLP, Eversheds Sutherland, Fidal, and several large multinational, enterprise organizations. 

Simple to set up and easy to use, Della offers lawyers an intuitive way to review legal documents. Whether a lawyer is reviewing large volumes of legal documents, or individual  complex contracts, Della focuses on the questions that lawyers really want to find the answers to. 

Christophe Frèrebeau, CEO and co-founder of Della, explains:

“The legal review market has moved away from simple data extraction, to solutions that provide end-to-end support of the entire legal review process. AI has moved up the value chain in legal, and users just don’t want to use pre-trained, customized AI, due to the time it takes to train those models and the cost involved in doing that. Larger transfer learning-based models, like Della’s, are replacing those legacy solutions, and we are enabling lawyers to use AI to help with more and more complex tasks.”

Della helps to accelerate the end-to-end legal review process. Users can create checklists, highlight relevant language, detect potential red flags, prepare custom reports, generate letters and other documents to help them to build their case and advise their clients. Using Della saves lawyers a considerable amount of time and improves the overall efficiency of a department.

Evgeny Sergeev, founder and General Partner at Pragmatech Ventures and CEO of iDeals, comments:

“Della is redefining what people think legal tech can do, and we look forward to helping Della continue its impressive growth. We will be supporting Christophe and the team across a wide range of tasks, from hiring to operations. 

“It is hard to deny the relevance of artificial intelligence and its applications in the field of law, in general, and, in particular, to legal review workflows. We strongly believe that Della will shape the future technology stack of both law firms and corporate legal teams globally, and we plan to spend a significant amount of time with the company and its management team to help them on their journey.”

A Della user and product owner at a large UK law firm said

“The team at Della are fantastic and have helped us greatly on our technology journey. They have helped us each step of the way with engagement, training, and to further develop our use of Della’s technology as we use it on more complex use cases. Della is incredibly easy to use, so it has been much easier to build adoption across our teams than with other technology products. User feedback has been excellent and that word of mouth is helping to push adoption of Della further.”

How does Della work? 

Central to Della’s approach is the fact that its AI understands how real people speak, taking into account how syntax and grammar of a query interact. This means that lawyers can easily find the information they are looking for, even if it’s hidden amongst hundreds of legal documents. Della then provides an output, whether this might be a custom report or a summary, which is as close in format to what a lawyer might produce for their clients.  

Della’s AI is built on a ‘massively pre-trained language model’, which enables transfer learning. The AI continuously learns and improves from any interactions with the platform. This creates a network effect and reduces the cost and time needed to solve complex problems with AI. In addition, it takes minimal time for a new user to start using Della which massively reduces time-to-value.

About Della

Della provides law firms and in-house legal teams with artificial intelligence to accelerate review and audit of legal documents. Della has developed a unique question answering technology which enables legal professionals to analyse documents based on their own questions and checklists, allowing them to make the best use of their own expertise. This novel technology allows firms of all sizes to use and adopt AI without the significant time investment which was required for early AI players. Della’s platform is already used by law firms and in-house legal departments across the world. Della has offices in London and Paris. For more information, visit the Della website and follow us on LinkedIn.

About Pragmatech Ventures

Pragmatech Ventures is a venture capital firm that seeks to invest in Pre-seed, Seed and Series A B2B SaaS and marketplace businesses. The fund is mainly focusing on investments into the enterprise software and marketplace companies in HR Tech, cleantech, biotech, legal tech, martech and proptech sectors. For more information visit: pragma.tech

About Christophe Frèrebeau

Christophe Frèrebeau is the CEO and co-founder of Della. Della provides law firms and in-house legal teams with artificial intelligence to accelerate review and audit of legal documents. Della has developed a unique question answering technology which enables legal professionals to analyse documents based on their own questions and checklists, allowing them to make the best use of their own expertise. This novel technology allows firms of all sizes to use and adopt AI without the significant time investment which was required for early AI players. Founded in 2018, Della’s platform is already used by law firms and in-house legal departments across the world.

Previously, Christophe was an executive at eVestment managing international operations. eVestment is a Fintech that was acquired by Nasdaq in 2017. Christophe joined eVestment in 2012 after its acquisition of Fundspire, an analytics and reporting platform for hedge funds and hedge fund investors which he founded in 2009. Having built technology companies from the ground-up, Christophe has extensive experience transforming business operations through the use of technology.