Syntracts Raises $5.3M to Power the Private Side of Legal AI
Syntracts revolutionizes legal knowledge management by transforming contracts into actionable intelligence, offering swift, secure, and precise insights for legal professionals.
Most legal AI startups may be rushing to the cloud, but Syntracts is taking the opposite route and they just landed $5.3M to prove why that matters. Founded by Douglas Bemis (former CTO at Uber AI Labs) and Christopher Martin (ex–Latham & Watkins), Syntracts is building a privacy-first, on-prem infrastructure layer that integrates directly into a firm’s existing workflows. It’s not another point solution or shiny front-end tool—it’s a secure API that transforms messy contracts into structured data, ready for use across dashboards, document systems, and AI assistants. All while staying behind the firm’s firewall.
“Our mission is simple: enable law firms to use AI that’s both private and verifiable,” said Bemis. “Firms don’t need another app—they need a secure data layer that powers their existing AI with clean, structured knowledge from their own contracts.”
The company’s Seed round was led by Hyperplane, with participation from Khosla Ventures, Myriad Venture Partners, Harvest Capital, Fortitude Ventures, and Point72 Ventures.
Not Your Average Contract AI
Rather than relying on a single large model and prompt engineering, Syntracts trains hundreds of specialized small language models—each focused on a specific legal clause or concept. This “mixture of experts” approach, powered by synthetic data, creates high-accuracy outputs with minimal hallucinations and consistent performance over time.
For firms that deal with complex or regulated documents, this setup offers far more control than off-the-shelf AI platforms. It also allows teams to retrain and fine-tune in-house, ensuring that legal nuance and firm preferences are reflected in the AI’s outputs. “In law, you shouldn’t have to choose between airtight privacy and answers that are consistent and reliable. We’re building the secure AI backbone for the legal industry,” Martin says.
Built for Legal Workflows, Not Around Them
Syntracts integrates with document management systems like iManage, NetDocs, and SharePoint—helping firms ingest contracts, structure the data, and feed it back into existing tools. The goal isn’t to replace how lawyers work, but to augment legal workflows quietly and powerfully behind the scenes.
Initial use cases include:
Automating deal summaries for knowledge management teams
Structuring precedent data to make AI assistants more accurate
Supporting compliance audits, diligence reviews, and insurance analysis
Tracking provision types across document sets (e.g., buyer-friendly vs. seller-friendly clauses)
Out of the box, Syntracts already delivers over 90% accuracy, and that improves with continued usage. The platform also allows users to trace answers back to specific text, boosting auditability and trust.
Why It Matters
As law firms scramble to adopt AI, accuracy and privacy remain the biggest roadblocks. Many tools can generate quick wins, but few offer the long-term trust needed to embed AI into core workflows. Syntracts isn’t chasing the hype. It’s building infrastructure. And that’s why this round matters: it’s a bet on depth over flash, precision over speed, and systems over demos.
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