On Monday, Miami-based AI marketing startup FirmPilot announced that it closed a $5 million series A funding round led by Blumberg Capital.
The new series A investment comes more than six months after the startup closed on a $2 million seed funding round in late 2023, led by venture capital firm Valor VC.
FirmPilot, which uses AI to analyze clients’ competitive landscape and help them optimize their online marking campaigns and content, specifically targets the law firm market.
The startups’ founder and CEO Jake Soffer told Legaltech News that, as of now, FirmPilot clients are “pretty much all law firms. We’ve done some experimentation with companies that aren’t law firms, just people who are family friends, asking us for marketing help … but FirmPilot is focused on law firms right now.”
In fact, Soffer, who previously founded another startup Rollio AI eight years ago, first conceived of the idea for FirmPilot to help his brother, a personal injury attorney in Miami. “He [had] just finished working with his fourth marketing agency. And it was the same thing every time that he had experienced. They promised him the world. They made content that looked pretty, but didn’t deliver results, clients. … And then lastly, it didn’t feel like there was authenticity or trust in the reporting.
As an experiment, Soffer built two proprietary AI models, both trained on publicly available legal documents and knowledge, that would become the foundation for FirmPilot. The first was called model “domain expertise,” which writes marketing “content with deep expertise, but not just shouting out facts,” Soffer said. “The way we’ve structured the data in our legal knowledge network, the design and architecture of our models allows us to do it in a flow and structure that readers find really helpful, and Google notices that.”
The second model, “competitive intelligence,” analyzes competitors’ “blogs, their websites, their overall SEO performance, their ads on social media. So this is how we take the guessing out of it. So [we tell firms] two things: here’s the knowledge and here’s the exact structure to package it in, because this is what we see working for other firms that we’re trying to compete with. And here’s what we see them doing that may be not working.”
Soffer believes that using AI to optimize and “take the guesswork” out of marketing will help to level the playing field for smaller firms. “We’re not reinventing the wheel, how marketing should be done. We’re just allowing small to midsize firms, that don’t have a $10 million marketing budget, to have a machine that can do the work that equates to that kind of value by using data—way, way more data—than humans can process to create marketing that is delivering leads and ROI.”
Looking ahead, Soffer said the startup plans use the new investment to bring these services to more law firms. He noted that the funding will help FirmPilot “build out a team [of] sales [and] marketing people” as well as what he calls “happiness engineers,” essentially account managers that interact with clients and “[make] sure they feel like we’re a partner, not just a vendor.”
Soffer also wants to expand the type of marketing FirmPilot can undertake for firms, noting that the startup has “a lot of exciting things on our roadmap. Today, it’s SEO, blogs, social media ads. … But if you think of every medium that attorneys advertise on digital and nondigital, we’re building some really interesting technology that makes it as simple as a click and done.”
FirmPilot is the latest startup to capitalize on growing interest in the legal tech industry and more willingness from investors to back new entrants. Since the beginning of May, a number of relatively new legal tech startups have also announced significant funding, including Superlegal, Skribe.AI, Leya and Definely.
A previous version of this article stated the Series A round was $7 million. That was incorrect; the round was $5 million, while the company’s total funding to date is $7 million.
