A year after launching its free legal templates, GitLaw is taking its next major step toward making legal documents accessible to everyone.
The San Francisco-based AI company, founded by entrepreneur Nick Holzherr, has raised a $3 million (£2.3m) pre-seed round to power the launch of its agent – part of GitLaw’s platform built for startups and small businesses, not law firms – that helps teams draft, review, and negotiate contracts in minutes, for free.
Unlike generic AI tools, GitLaw’s agent is powered by a library of more than 1,000 lawyer-approved templates contributed and vetted by verified legal experts across the US and UK.
The pre-seed round, announced alongside the Agent launch, was led by Jackson Square Ventures, with participation from Flex Capital, Background Capital, and several angel investors.
The funding has fuelled GitLaw’s product development and AI platform expansion across the US and UK.
In August Holzherr stepped down as CEO of Samsung Food due to “really feeling the urge to set up a new startup again with the dizzying acceleration of AI”.
He left the post 13 years after first pitching the idea that became Whisk and later Samsung Food to Lord Sugar on BBC show The Apprentice.
The Birmingham-born entrepreneur grew the food tech business into a profitable platform, working with the likes of Asda, Tesco, Waitrose and Ocado before selling to Samsung in 2019.
GitLaw is headquartered in San Francisco and operates with a distributed team across the US and UK. The company’s mission is to make access to legal documents radically more accessible through AI-driven automation.
“Commercially-minded lawyers won’t be out of work, but most day-to-day contract work can now be done faster, cheaper, and often more accurately by automation,” said CEO Holzherr.
While many founders are turning to tools like ChatGPT to review or generate contracts, Holzherr warns that this approach is risky: “Generic AI tools speak with extreme confidence but their answers often have serious flaws.
“For example, some only read a fraction of a contract, but still claim to have read it all. I’ve been really surprised at how lazy some of the tools are, probably because they’re trying to save tokens (their cost), and that’s dangerous when legal precision matters.”
GitLaw takes a more rigorous approach. Its agent orchestrates multiple AI models and workflows behind the scenes, mirroring how a human lawyer would handle a task – comprehensively and methodically.
“When I founded my first startup, I was shocked by our first legal bills,” continued Holzherr. “We were spending thousands on contracts before we had an income. It made me realise how stacked the system is against small teams.
“Legal work shouldn’t take six weeks for a three-day project, and businesses shouldn’t have to choose between moving fast and staying legally safe. GitLaw is my way of fixing that, helping founders get professional-quality contracts instantly without needing a big budget.”
Greg Gretsch, founding partner and managing director of Jackson Square Ventures, added: “The market for legal services is enormous and badly underserved, especially for startups and small businesses that can’t afford traditional legal help. GitLaw is tackling that gap with a product that’s as transformative as it is accessible.
“Nick has a rare combination of technical depth and market vision and we have no doubt he’ll drive GitLaw to be the go-to legal infrastructure for this part of the market.”
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