Supio, a startup that uses AI to automate data collection and analysis for legal teams, has raised $60 million in a funding round led by Sapphire Ventures with participation from Mayfield and Thomson Reuters Ventures.
The new capital, which brings Supio’s total raised to $91 million, will be put toward growth, hiring, and go-to-market efforts, co-founder and CEO Jerry Zhou told TechCrunch. Supio plans to expand its Seattle HQ and open a new office as it roughly doubles its 100-person staff.
Supio is one of the many startups vying for customers and mindshare in the AI legal tech space. While there’s skepticism about just how well AI can perform certain legal tasks, law firms are under competitive pressure to embrace it — lest they risk falling behind. According to one survey, AI adoption in the legal profession nearly tripled from 11% in 2023 to 30% in 2024.
The idea for Supio came about after Zhou and Kyle Lam, Zhou’s childhood friend and a co-worker at tax compliance software firm Avalara, left Avalara to build their own business. Zhou says that they saw an opportunity to “transform how people work with documents.”
“Every day, attorneys and paralegals spend thousands of hours manually reviewing medical records, police reports, and expert opinions,” Zhou said. “Supio’s core product serves these users by giving them a deep understanding of their complex, unstructured data.”
Supio, which focuses on personal injury law, offers an AI-powered platform that connects to law firms’ existing file systems to assist with case management. Zhou claims that Supio employs “human verification” to combat AI-introduced errors and ensure reasonable accuracy.
“We focus deeply on specialized [AI] model and quality control at the document and data layer,” Zhou said. “Our legal AI supports over 114 case types and that number is growing in partnership with our customers.”
Supio has had quite a successful year, according to Zhou. Annual recurring revenue has grown 4x, as has the size of Supio’s customer base. The company’s clients now include Hughes & Coleman, Daniel Stark, Thomas Law Offices, Whitley Law, and other personal injury and mass tort law firms.
To support this (and future) expansion, Supio recently appointed heads of sales, customer success, and marketing and advertising.
“AI has created a major inflection point for the legal industry as a whole,” Zhou said. “Every firm across every sub-vertical of law is thinking about how they need to reinvent themselves for the AI era. If Excel transformed finance 30 years ago, AI will do the same for legal knowledge workers.”
