Robert Ambrogi Blog
ROSS founders Pargles Dall’Oglio, Andrew Arruda and Jimoh Ovbiagele.
The artificial-intelligence-driven legal research service ROSS Intelligence today announced an $8.7 million Series A funding round, adding to its earlier $4.3 million seed round.
The two-year-old company will use the funding to accelerate its growth, expand its product lines, increase its capacity, and attract world-class talent to its workforce, CEO Andrew Arruda told me.
This latest round was led by iNovia Capital with participation by Comcast Ventures Catalyst Fund, Y Combinator Continuity Fund, Real Ventures, Dentons’ NextLaw Labs and Apple’s deep learning lead, Nicolas Pinto.
ROSS also announced the hiring of Scott Sperling, formerly head of sales at WeWork, as vice president of sales. Sperling will lead the expansion of ROSS’s sales efforts across the United States.
In addition, Daniel Rodriguez, outgoing dean of Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, is joining ROSS as an advisor to assist with the company’s law school expansion and access to justice initiatives.
The company was founded in 2015 by Arruda, Jimoh Ovbiagele and Pargles Dall’Oglio at the University of Toronto.
“I’m proud of the talent we’re bringing on board,” Arruda said. “We’re attracting folks who’ve been at large organizations and have experience building up companies and taking them public.”
Arruda said ROSS will expand its legal research service into other practice areas, with labor and employment coming next, and also launch new product lines outside legal research.
“We started with search but we’ll be building an ecosystem around that, just like Google did,” Arruda said.
In a press release, Karam Nijjar, partner at iNovia Capital, praised ROSS as the market leader in the development of AI applications for the law.
“iNovia’s participation from the very earliest days of ROSS Intelligence, when the founders worked out of a basement of Toronto, Canada, has allowed us to help shape and guide the company as it’s grown from success to success,” Nijjar said. “We’re thrilled to be leading this Series A financing round to provide the ROSS Intelligence team with the firepower to rapidly scale their technical and sales expertise while expanding into the Fortune 500 legal market and beyond.”