August: High-Impact Configurable Legal AI for Midsize Firms

Knowledge work is experiencing a fundamental disruption. Going beyond the limits of traditional SaaS, today's AI agents can process unstructured data and take actions on a user’s behalf. This allows AI agents to tap into the massive existing $11T U.S. labor market [1], including services verticals that were previously considered too complex and labor-intensive to automate. With the ability of AI models to reason and enable agentic workflows, we believe the legal industry is one of the best poised verticals for AI disruption.

Within legal AI, we’ve seen larger startups, such as Harvey, focus on transforming big law and others, like EvenUp, focus on specific workflows within practice areas (primarily demand letters for personal injury). However, a majority of today’s mid-market legal firms remains overlooked and bottlenecked by document‑heavy tasks.

Mid-market law firms have strong incentives to automate these repetitive tasks in order to deliver the best possible client experience while remaining cost competitive. Lengthy, manual processes such as contract review, due diligence, discovery preparation, and drafting put a ceiling on the volume of cases that these firms can take on. Today, these workflows are done manually by associates, or outsourced to ALSPs (legal BPOs). To put this into context, the ALSP market is by itself a $28B market growing at 18% YoY [2]. A greater diversity in workflows, plus local standards and regulations, makes AI enablement of these workflows look very different for mid-market law than big law.

August is on a mission to transform the future of mid-market law. By productizing AI-enabled legal workflows, August is helping midsize law firms achieve new levels of growth – unlocking additional client and deal volume and enabling new fixed-fee pricing models to capture all of the latent demand and ultimately democratize access to legal services. August’s AI platform is purpose-built for the unique needs of midsize firms, offering modular agents and configurable AI workflows that seamlessly adapt to each firm’s day-to-day operations and case load.

We're thrilled to announce August’s $7M financing, led by NEA and Pear VC, with strategic participation from leading law schools and notable angel investors, including Gokul Rajaram, Geoff Charles (Chief Product Officer at Ramp), David Azose (Head of Engineering at OpenAI), and Kevin Zhang (Partner at Bain Capital Ventures), among other prominent backers.

Reshaping mid-market law

August’s platform dramatically accelerates time-intensive legal tasks. For example, complex dispute timeline creation, which typically requires seven hours of attorney work, can now be completed in just 30 minutes. Similarly, M&A due diligence processes that previously demanded six hours of lawyer time are now finished in 20 minutes. The platform offers time savings of this magnitude for numerous other legal workflows, including for disputes, real estate, capital markets, regulatory / ESG, and healthcare work.

Key to its effective results is August’s ability to offer bespoke automation for each firm. August offers personalized customer onboarding led by both attorneys and engineers. Its modular AI agents immediately adapt to local statutes, disclosure rules, and document standards, configuring themselves for the needs of their customers and for firm-specific output formats. Their workflows match each firm’s specific output rules and style guides, reducing the last mile customization effort that other AI outputs require.

Since the launch the platform is already driving substantial increases in workflow efficiency and revenue growth for customers. Hicksons, a leading Australian firm, used August to review 5,000 negligence files 90% faster, allowing the firm to expand its caseload capacity and compete more effectively for new clients. ELP, one of the largest tax firms in India, cut diligence time by 60%, enabling more advisory work and optimized fee structures. Additionally, a Florida litigation team used August to analyze 40,000 pages in a $100M dispute, saving seven figures in external counsel costs and weeks of partner time.[3]

Co-founders Rutvik Rao, Thomas Bueler-Faudree, and Joseph Parker are the kind of visionary team that we believe will reimagine the legal space – and they’re moving fast! They originally met each other at Columbia University while studying CS and working in the same ML research lab, moving on to collect experiences from mid-market law, Blackstone’s data science team, and big tech companies like Doordash and PayPal. They set out to build this platform after Thomas worked at a mid market law firm and experienced the inefficiencies first hand. In the short time since they launched August, they’ve consistently exceeded revenue and product milestones, and as a seed stage company are already reshaping the way their customers handle real casework. This is only the beginning, and we couldn't be more thrilled to partner with them as they overhaul legal workflows as we know them today for the hugely important sector of mid-market law.

August is headquartered in New York and is actively hiring across engineering, legal, product, and sales teams. If you’d like to join, check out open roles here!