ROSS Intelligence lands $8.7M Series A to speed up legal research with AI

Armed with an understanding of machine learning, ROSS Intelligence is going after LexisNexis and Thomson Reuters for ownership of legal research. The startup, founded in 2015 by Andrew Arruda, Jimoh Ovbiagele and Pargles Dall'Oglio at the University of Toronto, is announcing an $8.7 million Series A today led by iNovia Capital with participation from Comcast Ventures Catalyst Fund, Y Combinator Continuity Fund, Real Ventures, Dentons' NextLaw Labs and angels. At its core, ROSS is a platform that helps legal teams sort through case law to find details relevant to new cases. This process takes days and even weeks with standard keyword search, so ROSS is augmenting keyword search with machine learning to simultaneously speed up the research process and improve relevancy of items found. "Bluehill benchmarks Lexis's tech and they are finding 30 percent more relevant info with ROSS in less time," Andrew Arruda, co-founder and CEO of ROSS, explained to me in an interview.