A Chat With Irawati Puteri, Legali AI: From Stanford Lawyer To Building A Safety App That Keeps None Of Your Data

Most of us use our phones to photograph dinner. Irawati Puteri, founder and CEO of Legali AI, wants them to hold something far heavier: the messages, photos and posts that show what harassment, abuse or trauma looked like day by day, ready to hand to a lawyer, a therapist, a Title IX office or HR.

That’s the job of Lea, the company’s personal safety companion and private documentation vault, which helps someone understand what’s happening to them, stay safe in the moment and build that dated record.

Universities, employers, shelters and legal aid organisations provide Lea to the people they serve, so survivors never pay, and Puteri says it’s available globally. Legali AI works between Stanford, Berkeley and San Francisco, belongs to StartX and Berkeley SkyDeck Pad-13, and won the Best Booth Award for its survivor advocacy campaign after being selected for Startup Battlefield 200.

Puteri’s route there began in law. She was a corporate and litigation lawyer in Indonesia before taking an LL.M. in Law, Science and Technology at Stanford Law School, where a seminar in the university’s PhD minor in Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies gave her language for something she’d lived: that trauma and abuse are shaped by gender, by power and by who institutions choose to believe.

She went on to become Head of Legal at GovTech Edu, a digital transformation office in Indonesia, where she helped build the policy framework behind the Ministry of Education’s partnerships with Microsoft and Google, which brought AI tools and computing infrastructure to platforms serving 53 million students. That work taught her that technology only changes lives when institutions are willing to carry it.

Her view of safety reaches past physical danger to dignity, autonomy, reputation and a person’s right to define their own future. Puteri shared with us the story behind Lea, how it works and why it keeps none of its users’ data, along with what’s coming next, including a move to Apple Watch.

What Inspired You To Start Legali, And What Problem Were You Trying To Solve?

Lea began with my own story. Between 2016 and 2019, while I was in law school, I was in a coercive and abusive relationship. I was young, and I didn’t have the words for what was happening to me.

It didn’t leave a bruise, but it was deeply uncomfortable. It made me do things I shouldn’t do. When I finally asked for help, people were blaming my vulnerabilities and my own reactions were used against me.

I was being gaslighted heavily, and people were defending the abuser as he protected his images. I hadn’t responded the way people expected a victim to respond, so I was seen as inconsistent, and therefore not a credible, perfect victim.

I now understand what research on trauma has shown for decades: abuse doesn’t follow a neat timeline, and neither does trauma. Survivors freeze, appease, minimise and go back, and memory comes in fragments. Often you can only make sense of what happened by looking back at it, sometimes years later. Yet the systems we ask survivors to turn to still expect a clear, linear and immediate account.

The person who sexually harassed me told me he would ruin my life if I ever told anyone. He also went to the same law school as me. Later, while I was building Legali, a coordinated online campaign was waged against me, meant to make sure I wouldn’t be believed before my voice could grow.

I had legal training. I knew what evidence was and what a court would want to see. But I still couldn’t keep up. Every day there was something new to screenshot, date, save and report, across different platforms, while I was trying to run a company and simply stay okay. Every minute spent on the case was a minute taken away from building my dream life.

I learned in my own body what I had only understood in theory: the truth isn’t enough. You need organised evidence, and when you’re traumatised, you can’t build it alone. By then I had been advocating for survivors for more than eight years, and I had watched the same thing happen to women with far fewer resources than I had.

Sometimes the disbelief came from other women, too. And that makes you want to go back to your closet with your experience, failing to seek help.

People rarely fail at one step. They fall through the spaces between steps: recognising that what happened was abuse, collecting proof, staying safe, finding a lawyer and surviving the process, all while fighting and defending the right to be believed.

What scares me most is how AI is changing the economics of harassment. It has never been easier or cheaper to manufacture accusations, fabricate convincing screenshots, impersonate someone’s voice or identity and amplify false narratives across hundreds of accounts. Someone can create a lie in seconds and make it look like hundreds of people are saying the same thing.

Too often, nobody asks for proof. People treat anything uploaded to the internet as true. Repetition becomes credibility, and virality becomes a substitute for evidence.

The media can make this even worse. Publicity can be bought, sensational allegations generate clicks, and some outlets and content creators benefit financially from controversy without adequately verifying the facts. When attention becomes more profitable than accuracy, an unsubstantiated accusation can spread faster than the truth, and the damage can be irreversible even when the allegations are eventually disproven.

Meanwhile, the person being targeted is left with the impossible burden of disproving every accusation, documenting every attack and protecting their reputation while trying to live their life. The cost of manufacturing harassment has become almost zero, while the cost of defending yourself can consume your savings, career, mental health and years of your life.

We have built technology that makes it easier than ever to destroy someone’s credibility, but nowhere near enough technology to help people defend it. So yeah, that’s the big reason I started Legali. I wanted to turn AI from a tool that can amplify abuse into one that helps people recognise it, preserve evidence, establish what happened and reclaim control over their lives.

I wanted to help them reclaim control over their own stories without retraumatising themselves in the process. Each step of asking for help in dealing with abuse often means a different tool, a different office and telling the story again. Lea exists so that no one has to cross those spaces alone.

What Has Been Your Biggest Challenge So Far, And How Did You Overcome It?

The hardest part has been building a company about harassment while dealing with my own case. Some days the work and the attack were the same subject, and there was nowhere to step away to.

What carried me through was turning pain into design. Every tool I wished I had became something we built: a way to save evidence without screenshotting it piece by piece, a vault only I could open and an exit I could reach for if someone looked over my shoulder. In a way, Lea is the companion I needed and didn’t have.

The second challenge was focus. Legali began with three products. Survivors understood Lea in a single sentence, institutions were willing to pay for it, and it spread by word of mouth, so we put everything behind it.

I also built an advisory team around the risks a product like this carries, across clinical care, survivor advocacy, legal ethics and AI engineering, so that no decision affecting someone’s safety rests on one person’s judgment.

How Does Lea Work, From The Moment Someone First Opens The App To Turning Their Account Into An Attorney-Ready Record?

When someone opens Lea for the first time, their vault is protected by a PIN that only they know and by face ID. From there, they can speak to Lea in their own words, in any of the 50 major languages, in the app or through iMessage and WhatsApp.

Lea helps them make sense of what happened. It recognises 130 patterns of abuse, drawing on what research describes as coercive control: the ways isolation, monitoring, threats and humiliation can work together even when there are no bruises. It also treats a single incident as real, not only a pattern over time.

Documentation is where Lea does the heavy lifting. Instead of uploading evidence one screenshot at a time, they connect their phone and accounts, and Lea gathers the messages, photos and posts that matter into a dated, organised record. Our desktop app, Lea Trace, does this for iPhone messages and photos on Mac or Windows.

When they’re ready, Lea turns that record into what the next person needs: a clear timeline and evidence summary a lawyer can review, the information a protective order request usually requires, a Title IX or HR report or a draft FBI cybercrime report for a lawyer to check. They decide exactly what to share, and with whom.

What Does ‘Trauma-Informed’ Mean In Practice When You’re Designing An AI Companion?

For me, trauma-informed means designing for the moment someone is at their worst, not their best. We build on SAMHSA’s six principles of a trauma-informed approach: safety; trustworthiness and transparency; peer support; collaboration and mutuality; empowerment, voice and choice; and attention to cultural, historical and gender issues.

I also think often of Judith Herman’s work on recovery, which begins with safety and with restoring a person’s sense of control. Trauma takes power away. Good design should quietly give it back.

In practice, that means one question per screen and plain language. It means no one has to retell their story five times, because they tell it once and Lea keeps it. It means warning someone before an action that could put them at risk, like saving a file to a shared phone or sending an email, and giving them a way to take a share back. It means Lea is safe to close at any second.

It also means the AI knows its limits and is honest about them. Lea doesn’t decide if what happened ‘counts’, it doesn’t probe for details someone isn’t ready to give, and it doesn’t pressure anyone to report. It follows their pace, validates their experience without escalating it, and encourages connection with trusted people and professionals when they want it. The goal is to make support reachable while protecting dignity, autonomy and trust, never to replace human care.

Finally, it means we don’t market through fear. Research on anti-rape technologies has shown that much of safety tech is built around stranger danger, while most harm comes from people someone knows. We design for that reality.

Why Was Zero Data Retention So Important To You, And What’s Involved In Moving Lea Onto Your Own Locally Hosted Model?

Because the data survivors give us is some of the most dangerous data in the world if it ends up in the wrong hands. Records can be subpoenaed. Phones and accounts are often shared with, or watched by, the person causing the harm.

Anything a company keeps can be breached or demanded. I didn’t want Lea to become one more place where a survivor’s story could be turned against them, the way mine once was. So the survivor owns their record, and Lea doesn’t hold onto their data.

Moving to our own locally hosted model is the next step. It means running our AI on infrastructure we control, so the most sensitive conversations never pass through a third party. It also allows us to train and evaluate the model specifically for this work: recognising patterns of abuse, speaking across languages and cultures and responding in a trauma-informed way.

It takes serious investment in infrastructure, safety evaluation and security audits, and it’s one of the main things our pre-seed round will fund.

How Do Guard Mode, Disguise Mode And Quick Exit Work Alongside The Documentation Side Of Lea?

They all come from one belief: you can’t document anything if you aren’t safe first. Quick Exit lets someone leave Lea with one tap if a person walks in or looks over their shoulder.

Disguise Mode keeps Lea from looking like a safety app on their phone. Our safety alarm lets them hold a button to text and call their emergency contacts. Guard Mode, which we call Lea Alert, takes this further: it’s designed to notice a spike in distress, open an SOS and alert the people they’ve chosen.

Each of these feeds the documentation side. When an alert goes off, it’s logged to the vault with the time, so a frightening moment doesn’t become a gap in the record. Safety and evidence live in the same place, and the person remains in control of both.

How Has Your Legal Background And Advocacy Work Shaped The Way You’ve Built The Product?

Legal education and experience taught me what wins or loses a case. Too often the outcome depends on whose evidence is organised, dated and complete rather than on who’s telling the truth. Legal scholars have written about the ‘credibility discount’ survivors face, especially women, and I’ve seen it from both sides of the table. Lea is built to address that.
The law also taught me where the lines are. Lea is designed to respect the boundary against the unauthorised practice of law. It gathers what a lawyer needs and clearly signals when legal help is needed, rather than acting as a lawyer.

My advocacy shaped who Lea is for. I founded the #ThatWasAbuse movement, and my research contributed to reform in Indonesia that widened the legal window for rape survivors to access abortion from about six weeks to 14. That work taught me to listen to survivors first and to build for those with the least help.

And my years at GovTech Edu taught me how technology is adopted inside large, slow institutions, which is exactly how Lea reaches the people who need it.

Where Do You Draw The Line Between What Lea Can Do And Where Lawyers, Therapists Or Emergency Services Need To Step In?

Lea is there to inform, organise and protect. It isn’t a lawyer, a therapist or an emergency operator, and it should never pretend to be. Lea explains rights in plain language, but it doesn’t give legal advice and it doesn’t fill in court forms.

It doesn’t apply your facts to legal rules. It prepares the information and marks clearly when a lawyer is needed. Anything that goes to a court or to law enforcement goes through a lawyer first.

On the emotional side, Lea can help someone feel less alone at two in the morning, but it doesn’t diagnose and it doesn’t replace therapy. When someone wants a human, they can choose a trauma-informed clinician or lawyer from Lea’s network.
When someone is in danger, Lea steps aside. Hotlines and emergency calls are one tap away, and the safety alarm reaches their people immediately.

What’s Next For Legali, Including Bringing Lea To Apple Watch?

We’re building our privacy-first, locally hosted model and turning more institutional conversations into partnerships with universities, employers, shelters and public transit agencies.

On the product side, our biggest step is moving Lea from the phone to the wrist. On Apple Watch, Lea Alert will let someone call for help discreetly, without reaching for their phone, and it’s designed to notice signs of distress so help can begin even when they can’t press a button.

We’re also designing Lea Band, a discreet jewellery-style wearable with drink-spiking detection, and Lea Buddy (now in beta), which quietly flags abusive messages as they arrive. Alongside the app, we’re growing Lea Learns, a 15-module training programme that helps institutions prevent harm and respond with care when it happens.

We’re also building care for the hours and weeks after a sexual assault, a time many survivors face alone and without clear information. Some of the most important care is time-sensitive. A forensic exam, often called a rape kit, preserves the option to report later without committing anyone to it.

HIV prevention medication, known as PEP, needs to start within 72 hours. Emergency contraception, and vaccines for hepatitis B and HPV, can be offered at the same visit.

Lea will show which care is still within reach based on when it happened, help someone find a clinic and explain their rights before they walk in, including that they don’t have to involve the police unless they choose to. Afterwards, Lea reads their discharge papers and turns them into private reminders for follow-up tests and vaccine doses, so the care doesn’t end at the hospital door.

Short lessons on sexual health and healing, shaped with our clinical advisor, help people return to their own bodies on their own terms. When I wasn’t believed, a louder voice wouldn’t have helped. I needed a record, a safe place and someone beside me. That’s what we want Lea to be for everyone, everywhere.