Company: IFTI AI
Founder: Musadiq Ahmad
Website: https://ifti.ai/
About IFTI AI
IFTI is an AI operating system for small law firms. We started in 2026, in London, and we build for the ten thousand independent and high-street firms in England and Wales that handle most of the legal problems ordinary people actually have: two to fifty fee earners, no IT department, no operations team, partners answering enquiries between matters.
The problem is not the law. It is the work around it. Between the first message a client sends and a solicitor doing legal work there are around thirteen handoffs: qualification, conflict checks, identity, anti-money-laundering, source of funds, the engagement letter, document collection, payment, opening the matter, billing. Every one of them is a place where a day is lost or something is missed. We call it handoff debt. IFTI answers and qualifies enquiries around the clock, then runs the compliance and administrative work that follows.
The hard part was not building AI that answers a client. It was working out what the software must be forbidden from doing. A language model has no privileged channel for its instructions. The rule you gave it and the message your client typed arrive in the same place and are weighed together. So telling the model not to give legal advice holds almost every time and fails occasionally, and almost every time is the wrong standard for a regulated file.
So we stopped treating limits as instructions and made them architectural. In our system the action that sends an engagement letter does not exist until a named solicitor approves it. A politically exposed person or sanctions flag routes to the authorised money laundering reporting officer at the firm, and there is no auto-clear path in the code. It is an absence, not a setting. Every action writes to an append-only audit trail that nobody, including us, can edit. That decision cost us months and made the product harder to build, and it is the only reason a compliance officer will let it near their firm.
What we think that contributes to the SaaS ecosystem: most AI products in regulated markets are sold on capability. We think the more useful question, and the one buyers in regulated professions are starting to ask, is what the software is structurally incapable of doing. We are bootstrapped, with no external investment, and currently running pilots with independent SRA-regulated firms.
Want to find out what TechRound can do for your business?
