Bench IQ secures USD $5.3M to expand legal AI platform

Toronto's Bench IQ has secured USD $5.3 million in seed funding to further develop its judicial intelligence platform and expand its team in the US and Canada.

Bench IQ's platform is currently utilised by leading AmLaw 200 firms, including four of the top five, to better tailor legal arguments and strategies based on insights into individual judges' reasoning and decision-making styles. The company's core offering is a suite of AI-powered tools that aggregate and analyse custom judicial data, providing attorneys with actionable intelligence for litigation tactics.

This latest funding round was led by Battery Ventures and Inovia Capital, with additional participation from CIBC Innovation Banking, MVP Ventures, Maple VC, and Haystack VC. The newly raised capital will be used to grow Bench IQ's proprietary dataset, enhance its AI agent capabilities, and support recruitment efforts in North America.

AI and the legal landscape

Bench IQ addresses a significant challenge in judicial data. In the US, only about 3% of rulings are accompanied by written opinions, leaving traditional case law platforms with limited visibility into most judicial decisions. The company has constructed a proprietary dataset to capture insights from the other 97% of cases, using AI to convert this data into guidance for litigators.

Jimoh Ovbiagele, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Bench IQ, outlined the platform's core value in a statement.

"As AI reshapes law, much of the conversation has focused on first-order gains from automating existing work. The deeper unlock is AI's ability to enable work that was previously impossible," said Ovbiagele. "With Bench IQ, litigators gain judicial intelligence - the ability to understand how presiding judges think, enabling them to craft smarter strategies and deliver better results clients will pay for."

The process involves Bench IQ's AI agents identifying patterns in judicial reasoning. In cases such as bankruptcy auctions or high-value patent trials, the platform can reveal how a judge has ruled on similar issues in the past, what legal reasoning they employ, and how legal teams might adapt their strategy in light of those tendencies.

Jeffrey Gettleman, Co-Founder and Chief Commercial Officer at Bench IQ, highlighted the importance of understanding judicial philosophy.

"Bench IQ is transformative because we give litigators judicial intelligence that was once impossible to gather," said Gettleman. "In my 17 years representing clients in complex Chapter 11 cases - including United Airlines' USD $23 billion restructuring - I learned one fundamental truth: The judge is the single most important stakeholder in any legal proceeding. When billions are on the line, every nuance in judicial philosophy matters. Understanding how that judge thinks can determine success or failure."

Bench IQ's approach combines access to comprehensive judicial data with machine learning techniques honed by its founders' experience in both legal AI and large-scale law practices.

Bench IQ was established in 2023 in Toronto by a team that includes Ovbiagele, one of the original founders of ROSS Intelligence; Maxim Isakov, a former founding engineer of ROSS and Bench IQ's current Chief Technology Officer; and Gettleman, a 17-year veteran of Chicago-based Kirkland & Ellis.

The company plans to continue increasing its capability to provide judicial analysis for the legal sector as it expands its operations and dataset coverage.

Image courtesy of BenchIQ. Bench IQ co-founders, from left, Jeffrey Gettleman, Jimoh Ovbiagele, and Maxim Isakov.