Emelifeonwu: We’ve not scratched the surface yet
A lawtech contract specialist has raised $30m in Series B funding to further develop its use of agentic artificial intelligence (AI) as it expands outside the UK.
Nnamdi Emelifeonwu, co-founder and chief executive of Definely, said 30% of the firm’s income came from the US and it was likely to open an office there by the end of this year.
Definely helps lawyers review, edit and draft contracts, proofread them and locate the right precedents.
Mr Emelifeonwu, a solicitor, said its product Enhance acted as an “agentic layer on top of our core products”, carrying out multiple tasks simultaneously and removing the need for lawyers to check things manually.
“It’s all about workflows. That’s what our end-users really care about. We want to be the go-to solution for complex contracts.”
Mr Emelifeonwu met his co-founder Feargus MacDaeid at Freshfields when he was a trainee solicitor and Mr MacDaeid, who is registered blind, an associate.
Launched in 2020 as Define, the company received funding in June 2021 from the Google for Startups inaugural European Black Founders Fund before raising a further £2.2m in September that year, in a funding round led by Microsoft’s venture capital fund M12, having changed its name to Definely.
The firm secured $7m in Series A funding last year, in a funding round led by Octopus Ventures, part of the same group as Octopus Legacy, the Octopus Group’s fast-growing life-planning arm that now owns a law firm.
The latest round was led by Paris-based growth equity investor Revaia, joined by legal tech giant Clio, Alumni Ventures and Beacon Capital.
Mr Emelifeonwu said Definely had over 100 clients, including the likes of A&O Shearman, Slaughter and May, DLA Piper and Dentons, and in-house departments at BT Group, Deloitte and P&O Cruises. Law firms accounted for about 70% of Definely’s business.
He said he expected Definely’s staff of 85 to grow to over 100 by the end of the calendar year and that the firm would open an office in the US, where 10 staff were already based.
“We are a growing business and we have not really scratched the surface yet. There is a big, big sea of customers out there for us to reach.”
Mr Emelifeonwu said the arrival of GenAI was “the first time that the legal industry embraced AI in a meaningful way”.
He went on: “We’re still understanding the threats and opportunities. There will be a need for order of some kind, but now is not a time to be fearful, it’s a time to be excited.”
The biggest market for Definely was the US and Mr Emelifeonwu said the firm had signed up a top US bank and top US firm, neither of which he could name.
“We think that in the future the majority of our revenue will come from there.”
He added that Definely was “leveraging generative AI not for the sake of it but to solve real and tangible problems”. As a business, it had remained “highly capital efficient, prioritising sustainable growth rather than growth at all costs”.
Morgan Kessous, a partner at Revaia, commented that the company was proud to support a business “that is setting the standard for AI-powered legal technology” and the investment aligned perfectly with its belief in the “transformative power” of AI.
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