Jhana, a Bengaluru-based AI paralegal startup has raised $ 1.6 million in a first round of funding that it began closing in December 2023.
The round was led by Girish Mathrubootham, the founder of Freshworks, and Manav Garg, the founder of Eka Software, through their venture capital fund, Together Fund.
The round also had participation from a number of other select operators and funds. Operators who participated include Shyamal Anadkat—angel investor and member of the Applied AI team at OpenAI, Scott Davis—former Vice President of the cloud company VMWare, Harshil Mathur and Shashank Kumar—the founders of Razorpay and Partners at Mars Shot, Kunal Shah—the popular founder and angel investor, Cory Levy—investor and the founder of First Text, Z Fellows, and After School, and Ojas Shukla.
As per the company, an India portion of the round is still being closed and will be publicly disclosed soon.
The startup said that the new funds will be used to develop proprietary datasets and models as well as to hire world-class researchers both in the law and artificial intelligence.
“I come back to, ‘a rising tide lifts all boats.’ I want to build technology that democratizes access to justice, intelligence, and strategy in the law, for all those who rely on systems of governance. This round has fueled the early days of jhana and will set us on the path to work on our ambitions,” said Em McGlone, co-founder, Jhana.
“Lawyers are some of the smartest and most competent people, but lose significant portions of their time doing mundane tasks like needle-in-a-haystack retrieval and patterned negotiation. And those who collaborate or consult with lawyers often unduly distrust them or are intimidated by them. So, the intention with our experiments with embedding AI in legal systems is to see how legal work can become its most creative, satisfying, and realized self; to see how assistants can make the law more intelligible for both lawyer and client,” said Hemanth Bharatha Chakravarthy, Co-foundr, Jhana.
“And there’s nowhere else in the world that we’d rather conduct these experiments in artificial legal intelligence than in India. Just as my co-founders immigrated here to build our technology, I happily left behind my visa and American offers. I am reminded of Nehru’s speech at IIT Kharagpur’s first convocation ceremony—that India is going to be the most exciting place to live in, and “mind you” he says, he uses the word ‘exciting’ and not some other more leisurely word. That seems even more true today,” he added.
“At Together Fund, we are excited to support innovative companies that leverage AI to address key challenges in the legal landscape. jhana’s AI-driven paralegal solution has the potential to transform how legal professionals operate, enhancing efficiency and accessibility within the domestic market. We look forward to partnering with the team as they continue to redefine the future of legal support.” said Manav Garg, the Founder of Eka Software and SaaSBhoomi and a Managing Partner at Together Fund.
“jhana is bringing the cutting edge in LLM agent applications to novel use cases as well as jurisdictions in the law,” said Shyamal Anadkat, member of the Applied AI Team at OpenAI and mentor for the Neo Accelerator.
Founded in 2022 at Harvard University by classmates Em McGlone, Hemanth Bharatha Chakravarthy, and Benjamin Hoffner-Brodsky, Jhana provides AI-driven legal assistants designed to help lawyers, law firms, and in-house legal teams streamline research and document review processes.
Jhana’s AI paralegal solutions allow users to produce legal outputs—such as propositions, citations, and full-fledged memos—based on natural language inputs. The system draws from a proprietary database of over 15 million case law records, statutes, academic sources, and web-based references, ensuring accuracy and comprehensiveness in legal research.
The startup also offers customizable and siloed AI solutions for enterprise clients, enabling them to integrate AI into their existing cloud and file ecosystems. By leveraging AI, Jhana’s solutions aim to increase productivity and reduce errors in legal work.
Jhana’s team consists of ML scientists, legal scholars, and former practicing lawyers. It has had over 800 users beta-test its tools.
