Antidote, a London-based AI-powered legal tech platform, has become the latest startup in its increasingly crowded market to secure funding with the close of a $5m (£3.7m) seed round.
Founded in 2024 and first funded to the tune of $2m (£1.5m) the following year, the Antidote platform is used by law firms to automate billing compliance.
Law is among the industry’s most shaken up by the integration of generative AI technology, due to its highly administrative nature. Therefore, startups automating the laborious processes conducted by legal firms have been springing up and soaking up investments.
Antidote’s place in the crowded AI legal tech market is the automation of ensuring billing meets the complex requirements of Outside Counsel Guidelines (OCGs). The startup claims that traditional billing practices and OCG non-compliance results in an 8-12% loss of billable hours a year.
The company’s platform automatically reads time entries, checks them against client OCGs and firm standards and suggests compliant rewrites all before the initial bill is sent.
“Law firm billing compliance is one of the biggest sources of revenue leakage inside firms, not to mention being a generally despised manual task that adds to client friction,” said Antidote founder and chief executive Nicholas d’Adhemar.
“We built Antidote to remove billing friction by automating compliance for law firms – removing the manual work and shifting compliance upstream, when the work is done, not when you’re trying to send out the bill.”
The seed round was led by Lakestar, with participation from Concept Ventures, The LegalTech Fund and angels.
“Antidote is solving a deeply embedded and very expensive problem in the legal industry, and Nicholas brings rare credibility here,” said Navid Meyer, venture partner at Lakestar.
“He’s lived the problem as both a lawyer and a private equity client and has already built and scaled legaltech startups into category-defining platforms for legal spend management. We’re backing Antidote because it combines a clear product advantage with a founder who has proven he can execute in this market.”
