The Story Behind Haystack's Investment in Bench IQ

In the late summer of 2023, our friends at Lazer Technologies (thank you Zain and Arif!) messaged us about meeting their friend Jimoh Ovbiagele. Jimoh had previously been a co-founder & CTO of a legal research company called ROSS Intelligence, had an interlude at Coinbase, and was starting his next thing – Bench IQ. They were working on the solution to a long-standing issue in law: judges only document their reasoning in 3% of rulings. Using LLMs, they had created a new dataset that uncovers judicial reasoning behind the remainder of rulings.

At that time, the convergence of legal and AI was white hot in the market. Harvey had raised a Series A from Sequoia, and Thomson Reuters had just bought Casetext for $650m in cash, in one of the more memorable recent technology M&A events. But, there were also reasons to be skeptical or cautious. Legal had historically been a difficult market to sell software into, and the shift felt sudden. Was there too much hype? How would these workflows actually manifest “in production” for legal teams and lawyers? So Semil and I went into the meeting with Jimoh eyes wide open and curious to hear more. 

Jimoh impressed us right away when we met him. He was precise and measured in the way he communicated the vision, set goals, and sought to test hypotheses. He knew how to objection handle. He could spar on the intricacies of the legal system, detailing all the incentives and behaviors in each part of the layer cake from the Supreme Court down. And the prior experiences at ROSS gave him the right type of battle scars to equip him as a second-time founder. When we met the rest of the team, we knew they were perfect complements to Jimoh – Jeffrey Gettleman with his years of domain experience and rolodex from his long tenure at Kirkland & Ellis and Maxim Isakov with his technical acumen. 

Today, in early 2024, Bench IQ announces their $2.1M pre-seed round co-led by Haystack and our friend Andre Charoo at Maple, alongside portfolio founders Jason Boehmig of Ironclad and Qasar Younis of Applied Intuition. We are delighted to be working with the team. 

Bench IQ's first product provides legal teams with insights into their judges' reasoning in similar cases, previously inaccessible. Bench IQ has developed a comprehensive platform detailing the rationale behind all of a judge's rulings, complete with AI tools for lawyers to access it easily. Their product enables lawyers to understand key players in their legal battles, starting with judges, and eventually, their legal counterparts. They are already piloting with many of the top law firms in the country (including several AmLaw 100 firms), and the qualitative feedback from users is noteworthy. It also has been incredible to see the pace at which Big Law is open to adopting these new tools, departing from their reputation as traditionally poor purchasers. 

We believe that Bench IQ will stand on its own as a leading legal reconnaissance platform, but is also emblematic of new business models and market opportunities startups now take advantage of with LLMs and AI. Thank you for the opportunity, and onward!