We caught up with Richard Robinson, CEO at RobinAI, to talk all things from using technology to automate work for law firms, to the importance of testing in business…
Tell us about RobinAI
Robin AI is a London-based, venture-backed, machine learning start-up in the legal space —We use AI to read and edit simple contracts. Our technology has helped businesses and law firms cut costs by up to 70%, and save hundreds of hours of their time dealing with contracts like NDAs, Supplier Agreements and Data Protection Agreements. What makes us unique in the world of legal technology is that we understand and appreciate the limitations of AI. Understanding even simple contracts is hard, so we pair our AI tool with human legal professionals that validate the work of our technology and correct it when it goes off course. We call it AI+.
How did you come up with the idea for the company
My journey into law was relatively unusual – My parents are working-class immigrants, and I went to a comprehensive school in Birmingham – so I always approached the industry with an outsider’s perspective. I came up with the idea for the business when I was working as a lawyer for one of the world’s biggest banks. I noticed that while some of the work was complicated, a lot of it was quite repetitive and involved doing things that the legal team might have seen or done hundreds of times before. I wanted to find a way to use technology to automate repetitive work, so people had more time to do the work they like doing.
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What advice would you give to other people looking to start their own company?
We’ve been fortunate to have the support of our first investors, Forward Partners from the beginning of our journey. If I were to give other aspiring founders one piece of advice, before you seek external funding, it would be to test your idea as rigorously as you can with your target market. One of the biggest challenges technology companies face is building products without properly testing them with their target market. One of the reasons I think people are adopting our solution was because we interviewed around 100 lawyers to build our product, and we listened really carefully to what they wanted.
What can we hope to see from RobinAI in the future?
Over the next 12 months, we want to change the game in the use of AI to solve legal problems. We will be announcing huge partnerships with some of the biggest companies and law firms in the world, we’ll be announcing a brand new product to complement our existing contract review service, and we will hopefully be closing our Seed round to accelerate our plans. Keep an eye out for us!
