Checkbox, an Australian-founded AI startup that wants to build an AI ‘front door’ for in-house legal teams, will use the cash to build out its automated workflows.
Key Takeaways
- Checkbox has raised US$23 million (AU$32.7 million) in Series A funding to scale its AI ‘legal front door’ platform and automation capabilities.
- The funding round was led by Touring Capital, with participation from Peak XV (formerly Seqouia Capital India), Conductive Ventures, Tidal Ventures and Five V Capital.
- The platform centralises legal requests from channels like email, Slack, Teams and Salesforce, and leverages AI agents to automate routine tasks while directing complex work to legal teams.
- Checkbox is used by more than 100 enterprise organisations globally, including Telstra, Woolworths, Coca-Cola Europacific Partners and Xero.
Key background
Founded in 2016 by Sydney-siders and Forbes 30 Under 30 alumni Evan Wong and James Han, legal AI start-up Checkbox has raised US$23 million (AU$32.7 million) in its Series A. The start-up plans to use the funds to expand Checkbox’s ‘AI legal front door’ platform, which aims to replace fragmented, manual legal intake with intelligent, automated workflows across enterprises.
The platform’s AI agents capture legal requests from emails, Slack, Teams, Salesforce and intranet portals, and create automated workflows, which could include drafting contracts or approving conflicts of interest.
“We’ve seen tremendous demand for the Legal Front Door and the market is really resonating with how we’ve uniquely solved this problem,” said Evan Wong, co-founder and CEO of Checkbox. “Our customers go from operating in the dark and spending time on things they shouldn’t be, to working on what matters and getting visibility into demand, workload, and cycle times, which enables them to do better resource planning and demonstrate their value to the business.”
Checkbox’s AI platform is used by more than 100 enterprise organisations, including Telstra, Woolworths, Coca-Cola Europacific Partners, Macquarie Group, Hitachi, PepsiCo, Xero and more. Hitachi claims 83% of its routine legal and compliance requests are now partially or fully automated.
“We’ve had the privilege to work with the biggest companies in Australia who have helped us develop our product,” Wong said. “And now, we get the privilege to work with the biggest companies in the world who are helping us scale it to the next level.”
Crucial quote
“Every major business function has a core technology that they operate from. Legal still doesn’t. Our ambition is to change that and build the system that legal teams actually run on. This funding lets us move much faster toward making Checkbox the default, foundational technology for all in-house legal teams.”- Evan Wong, CEO and co-founder of Checkbox.
Tangent
Dam Secure, an AI cybersecurity start-up which launched this year, also just raised US$4 million (AU$6.1 million) in its seed funding round, led by Paladin Capital Group, to close ‘logic gaps’ created by the rapid adoption of AI coding tools.
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