The founder of Preqin has made his first investment following a £2.5 billion exit to BlackRock.
Mark O’Hare founded Valhalla Ventures following the sale last year and it has led a £14 million investment into LegalTech platform Avvoka.
Bootstrapped from launch in 2016, with just £600k raised from angel investors, the investment is the first institutional capital raised by the company behind AI-powered drafting infrastructure for law firms.
Founded by two former Magic Circle lawyers, Eliot Benzecrit and David Howorth, Avvoka has grown by working with large, complex legal organisations, helping them turn precedent and institutional knowledge into drafting systems that can be reused, supervised, and improved over time.
Rather than using AI as a replacement for existing approaches, the platform embeds AI within the rules-based automation frameworks that firms already trust.
The investment follows a record year of expansion for the company, and comes at a pivotal moment for the legal industry. As generative AI moves from experimentation to operational deployment, law firms are confronting a new constraint: that drafting at scale requires structured systems, governance and oversight.
Avvoka has spent the past decade building the drafting infrastructure required to embed AI safely into high-volume, high-variation legal work.
Its LLM-powered automation engine turns a legal document into a template. Variables, clauses and conditions are detected, while guardrails keep every draft consistent with a law firm’s existing standards.
To date, Avvoka’s technology has been adopted by over 20% of the Am Law 100 and leading global corporations including A&O Shearman, Fenwick, Fried Frank and Ropes & Gray, as well as in-house legal teams at Warner Bros. Discovery and other multinational businesses.
“AI has changed the pace of legal drafting. Client expectations have shifted, volumes are rising, and the old model of document-by-document automation no longer scales,” said Benzecrit.
“What firms need now is drafting infrastructure – systems that embed structure, governance and human oversight alongside AI capability. That’s how you scale without diluting quality. Avvoka exists to build that infrastructure.
“We help legal teams turn their knowledge into structured, supervised systems that increase output while protecting their edge.”
O’Hare founded Preqin, an alternative assets data and intelligence business, in 2003 and grew it into a global platform used by institutional investors worldwide.
Howorth added: “We’re delighted to work with Mark, who has known the business for years, and believes in our approach and long term vision.
“Mark’s experience of building Preqin into a global platform made Valhalla the perfect fit for our next stage.
“This capital enables us to accelerate our US expansion and deepen the platform for high-volume, high-variation work while staying true to the principles that got us here: governance, control and respect for institutional knowledge.”
O’Hare added: “AI is changing how legal work is done, but it won’t replace the need for robust systems. Avvoka’s attraction is their recognition that drafting is not a tool problem — it is an infrastructure problem. Firms that want to scale without diluting their expertise will need platforms built with that reality in mind.”