Genie AI is reaping the rewards of a business strategy overhaul it pursued some five years ago. The UK based legal AI startup is part of an illustrious group of newcomers disrupting the sector which includes Harvey AI, Robin AI, Luminance, Clio and Legora, among others. Many of these disruptors are now being used in large Magic Circle law firms.

For example, Harvey AI is being used by A&O Shearman, Latham & Watkins and Willkie Farr & Gallagher, Legora by Linklaters, and Definely and Luminance by Slaughter and May.

But in Genie AI’s case, it turned out that building solutions for law firms was just a starting point. It’s how the company raised VC capital and how it proceeded to carve out a niche in the wider legal AI market.

Genie AI was founded in 2016 by Nitish Mutha and his University College London fellow student Raffi Faruq. The pair met while doing a Masters degree in machine learning at a time when the technology had yet to saturate mainstream business processes.

The company joined the London branch of incubator Entrepreneur First with its original mission to serve law firms. “We were building AI before LLMs became a big thing, using traditional machine learning with much longer development cycles,” says Mutha who now serves at CTO.

But Mutha and Faruq soon realised that if their aspiration was to transform the legal industry, they had to understand stakeholder motivations more deeply. “They’re [law firms) more motivated to charge billable hours,” Mutha explains. So, in effect, greater efficiency and reduced billable hours using Genie AI’s platform was not a great use case fit.

This disconnect was the motivation behind pivoting the business to serve the end user who was consuming legal services – and, in the process, provided access to a much larger enterprise market.

“It was not like our discussions with Big Magic Circle law firms were not going well. They were going just fine,” says Mutha, which makes the pivot a judgement call that was not immediately obvious.

A single legal AI platform accessible to anyone

But the challenges had become clearer as the company grew. Each individual law firm runs different and complex legacy tech stacks. In addition, there are an inordinate variety of documents, and levels of permissions, as well as documents that require very nuanced customisations. And that didn’t bode well for building “a good tech product which we can then sell to everyone,” says Mutha.

A single product which can work for everyone, that the startup could focus its resources on seemed like the best strategy. This, against the advice of investors.

But the pair were led by their own vision that they believed would change the legal process for non-legal people. And at the risk of using the most hackneyed descriptor of AI, Mutha believes Genie AI’s product really does democratise legal work.

However, “Our messaging was a bit mixed up,” admits Mutha. The change in the company’s growth strategy and target market was not reflected in its outreach, says Mutha. “Proper branding and positioning in our target market is something we will be trying to improve on this year,” he adds. The mission is now “super clear how and to whom we want to sell or serve, and our focus is on businesses with in-house legal teams.”

The proposition that enterprises don’t need to hire in-house lawyers. “In-house legal teams are overstretched in most businesses,” notes Mutha.

In fact, the product will enable anybody in business to carry out legal work, be it the creation of contracts, customising and drafting contracts, or reviewing long and complex legal agreements. In addition, Mutha notes the agentic component of the product means that negotiation will become a critical value proposition for the product. The startup claims deals can close up to 70% faster using the platform.

The construction and energy sectors are the current enterprise focus for Genie AI as they are both industries with a large proportion of non-legal employee roles that require interacting with contracts- mostly for commercial reconciliation and transactions.

Genie AI’s models have over 10 million clause revisions – enabling the startup to create a “global legal brain” for what is market standard for every clause, contract and jurisdiction. The company covers more than a jurisdictions with multi-language support.
Mutha describes the Genie AI proposition for enterprise as a kind of a massive “knowledge graph of a business” grounded in a businesses’ document catalogue that understands at a very deep level what that business does, what kind of agreements are involved and who its typical customers, vendors and partners are.

This creates highly personalised that outputs and reflects the kind of experience a lawyer would bring to the process. Businesses can choose their level of interaction from end-to-end work with a last mile review versus more of a collaborative process with AI as a copilot.

The product is not sector specific and spans anything from construction companies to football teams. In July 2025, Cambridge United became the first professional football club to manage player contracts end-to-end using AI, through its partnership with Genie AI.
The pivot away from the Magic Circle law firm market was a leap of faith that paid off, according to Mutha. In October 2024, the company raised around $17.8m in a Series A funding round from Google Ventures and Khosla Ventures and now has around 200,000.

Risks of outsourcing legal services

But what of the risks of outsourcing legal expertise to non-legal employees. Mutha addresses this by noting that much of the work involved is essentially using a highly intelligent data processing system that analyses documents at scale, rather than a text generating system. This limits the likelihood of hallucinations.

Genie AI is ISO 27 certified and while it uses OpenAI and Anthropic models, it has a zero data retention policy with them. “We use them as a processor, but never for storage, so data is wiped out once the processing is done,” says Mutha. Furthermore, the early adopter clients that the company works with are willing to take some risk as they’re already non-legal people who are already interfacing legal documents.

On the balance between work augmentation versus replacement, Mutha acknowledges that the topic is sensitive. “I think that it varies. Much depends on the business, because there are different risk appetites. Some firms may want a final say from a legal expert, then I think it’s more case of augmentation whereas certain firms are bolder and more risk-taking,” he adds.

In the startup world, a business pivot, like the one Mutha and Faruq decided upon, is most often the fulcrum upon which entrepreneurs fail or succeed. Courage and vision are required but don’t always mean success. “I think it’s paid off,” says Mutha.