AI legal tech startup ZERØ secures $12 million in funding to automate time-consuming tasks for lawyers

Do you know that an estimated 30% of knowledge workers’ time is wasted on administrative tasks? Now, small and big enterprises alike are seeking new ways to reduce waste and become more productive. That’s why this tech startup has made its mission to solve one of the professional services industry’s most pressing problems – mobile email management.

ZERØ is a California-based startup born out of the work of one of its co-founders on cancer image detection on MRI machines. According to the story shared on the website, they later realized that the technology relied upon A.I. to ensure a correct cancer diagnosis for the patient.

In building this technology, the primary concern was not only accuracy but with maintaining data privacy. The innovation here was to build a machine learning algorithm that could process large amounts of data and provide accurate diagnoses without ever having that data leave the device. In October 2014, Alex Babin, Alexander A Volkov, and Gevorg Karapetyan founded ZERØ.

Today, ZERØ announced it has raised $12M in Series A funding. The round was led by Streamlined Ventures with participation from 468 Capital, AltaIR Capital, PBJ Capital, Gutbrain Ventures, s16vc, AiSprouts VC, and others.

The infusion of new capital comes at a time of rapid growth for ZERO that has seen its revenue tripling and the headcount doubling in 2021. ZERØ will use the funding proceeds to accelerate market expansion and to enter new verticals with its AI-powered data classification engine as well as automation modules built on top of it.

ZERO’s productivity automation suite uses AI and advanced workflow technologies to optimize the performance of knowledge workers. This new funding will allow ZERO to build on its global market momentum in the professional services industry – where its clients include many of the Am Law 200 firms, accounting firms, and market leaders within financial services.

ZERO is a fully autonomous, edge-computing productivity automation solution focused on the professional services market. ZERO’s applications enable knowledge workers to be more productive and generate more revenue by automating and streamlining business-related tasks.

“ZERO’s software automation platform is the perfect solution for white-collar workers,” said Streamlined Ventures General Partner Ullas Naik. “For law firms and other services firms, most of the other generic productivity and automation tools don’t suffice, as they have very specific security, compliance, and regulatory requirements that apply to their workflows. ZERO has targeted and garnered significant adoption in Big Law and has since expanded into other white-collar industries such as consulting and accounting. We are very excited to have invested in each of ZERO’s financing rounds since their seed round and we look forward to helping the company become a significant market leader.”

Escalating client expectations, increased competition, and limited access to talent are among the key challenges facing professional services today. An estimated 30% of knowledge workers’ time is wasted on administrative tasks, and enterprises are seeking new ways to reduce waste and become more productive.

“The message that knowledge workers feel they have been ignored when it comes to the time and resources needed to accomplish basic job tasks has been coming through loud and clear,” said Alex Babin, CEO and co-founder of ZERO. “ZERO is on a mission to improve knowledge workers’ productivity through the application of automation technologies and our recent round of funding provides further industry validation concerning the significant advancements we’ve achieved with our productivity automation platform.”

ZERO is a fully autonomous, edge-computing productivity automation solution focused on the global professional services market. Unlike many other automation technologies, productivity automation places a cognitive layer between the user and an organization’s legacy software. This new design allows ZERO’s platform to imitate human cognitive functions by automating the repetitive work that one billion global knowledge workers spend their time on every day, and in doing so it measurably increases output without taking the person out of the loop.

“ZERO’s technology sits upon and optimizes existing legacy systems. It provides a secure layer of automation that runs in the background, using autonomous virtual agents to mimic human decision-making in high-value, repetitive processes like information prioritization and data classification,” said Gevorg Karapetyan, CTO and co-founder of ZERO. “This automated intelligence sits on billing, email, and document management systems, enabling organizations to increase productivity and accuracy at the user and firm-wide level.”