Eudia, an artificial intelligence startup for in-house corporate legal teams, launched Thursday with up to $105 million in early-stage funding to bring the power of AI agents to the legal industry.

The Series A round was led by General Catalyst with participation from Floodgate, Sierra Ventures, Hakluyt Capital, Defy, Everywhere Ventures, B3 Capital, Backbone and Firsthand.

“We’ve built a platform that consists of an army of AI agents combined with a data and knowledge platform,” Eudia Chief Executive Officer Omar Haroun told Bloomberg.

AI agents are part of a growing trend in the industry known as agentic AI, a type of artificial intelligence that is teachable, adaptable and can take actions with little or no human oversight. Eudia uses agents to augment the knowledge work of legal teams to help reduce routine work, illuminate insights and empower them to scale operations to minimize the overall “toil” of menial legal tasks.

Haroun revealed that the company’s name was inspired by Aristotle’s concept of “eudaimonia,” described as the highest form of human flourishing and happiness that can be strived for. Eudia seeks to achieve this for legal teams through what the company calls “augmented intelligence,” not replacing lawyers but giving them the tools they need to do their jobs better.

The company said it blends its agentic AI platform with the expertise of human lawyers to provide best-in-class support for chief legal officers at Fortune 500 companies and their in-house legal departments. Customers including Cargill Inc., DHL Group, Duracell Inc. and Coherent Corp. have already signed on with the startup.

“Eudia is not a software provider, it is the future of our department,” said Rob Beard, chief legal officer of Coherent. “Eudia is headcount I don’t have to hire; it’s enterprise risk reduction in that it helps us understand the legal data we already have. It’s a major part of our transformation story.”

As an emerging industry, legal AI continues to attract more startups looking to fill the gaps for law firms and in-house legal teams using generative AI for document drafting, automation, contract management, review and operations. Lawyers who have used general-purpose AI models, rather than those designed for legal work, have run into legal trouble when the AI “hallucinated” information. For example, a New York lawyer in 2023 used OpenAI’s ChatGPT to create a legal brief, which resulted in the AI citing fake cases.

Companies and AI platforms such as Harvey, Eve, EvenUp Inc. and Robin AI Ltd. have launched copilots, AI assistants and AI models to serve the legal industry. Ironclad Inc., a digital contract management contract, launched a conversational AI assistant named Jurist in October. The global legal AI industry is growing rapidly and is projected to reach $14.6 billion in 2035 from about $1.5 billion in 2024, according to market research firm Roots Analysis.

Image: SiliconANGLE/Microsoft Designer