WilsonAI raises $1.7M in pre-seed funding for ‘AI paralegal’

WilsonAI Co., the provider of an artificial intelligence-powered assistant for in-house legal operations, said today it has raised $1.7 million in pre-seed funding to accelerate the development of what the company calls an AI paralegal that companies can “hire” for their teams.

The company was founded in 2024 by Chief Executive Gus Neate, formerly a lawyer at British multinational law firm Clifford Chance LLP, and Chief Technology Officer Alex Wang, formerly a developer at New York City-based investment firm D. E. Shaw & Co. It wants to change how legal teams operate using AI.

“We’re building an AI that doesn’t just answer questions but actively participates in legal teams’ daily workflows,” said Wang. “By integrating with in-house legal data and processes, Wilson’s AI paralegal becomes an invaluable team member, delivering efficiency and consistency at scale.”

The company provides an AI agent that can handle most of the routine work done by legal teams, responds to frequently asked questions and integrates with internal legal knowledge bases. Wilson is building what the company calls a “legal large action model,” or LLAM, which can understand the complex flow of legal work and improve over time through interaction with employees.

The model uses agentic AI, a type of AI that can take actions with little or no human oversight and can adapt to changing situations. Unlike other static tools, WilsonAI is designed to refine itself over time to the internal company culture and work behaviors by connecting to tools, content relationship management, data and everyday management of employees to reflect their needs.

Early deployments showed the AI paralegal can automate over half of routine legal queries and accelerate contract review by up to 70%, according to Wilson. This means significant time savings for many in-house lawyers, who reported recovering up to 15 to 20 hours a week for more interesting and impactful work.

The emergence of AI tools such as Wilson’s AI paralegal comes at a time when AI adoption in the legal industry is on the rise, but it comes at a cost. AI systems can be inaccurate, or “hallucinate,” which means they produce fake case citations, especially when lawyers use generalist AI models such as ChatGPT not designed for legal work.

In a recent example, Morgan & Morgan, which bills itself as “America’s largest injury law firm,” got itself in trouble earlier this month when one of its lawyers used an AI system that produced erroneous results and didn’t double-check them. In a letter shared in a court filing, the law firm’s chief transformation officer, Yath Ithayakumar, warned lawyers that if they use AI, they should be proofing their work.

“As we previously instructed you, if you use AI to identify cases for citation, every case must be independently verified,” Ithayakumar wrote. “For example, this is no different from what we all learned in the first week of law school – case law must be checked to ensure it is still good law.”

Neate told SiliconANGLE the Morgan & Morgan case highlights why Wilson is built differently.

“Unlike general AI models, Wilson is specifically trained on each company’s internal legal documents and provides clear source verification for every response,” Neate said. “When Wilson cites something, it always links directly to the original document in your system — no hallucinated cases or mystery citations.”

For sensitive matters, Neate said there is a “fast verification” method that keeps lawyers in the loop before a response can be used by allowing them to quickly see what citation is being used and track it back to the source.

The funding round was led by Nomad Ventures, with additional participation from Autopilot Ventures, Entrepreneur First, Transpose Platform, and strategic angels, including Mei Z and several law firm partners.

Wilson said that the new funding would go toward continuing to build features into its AI paralegal agent and expand its integrations with existing legal tech stacks. The company has already deployed its AI agent with 10 high-growth technology businesses and intends to accelerate the onboarding of more customers.

Image: SiliconANGLE/Microsoft Designer