Wordsmith Raises $70m to Bring Legal Work Back In-House and Away From Law firms

The legal AI startup now serves more than 500 in-house teams using Wordsmith to organize, route and complete legal work across the business, reducing reliance on outside counsel

Wordsmith AI today announced a $70 million Series B funding from Highland Europe and Index Ventures among others. The round comes alongside an expansion of Wordsmith's product and new enterprise customer wins, including Sage and Starling. It follows a year of rapid growth for Wordsmith which is now used by more than 500 companies, including BT, Financial Times, Safelite, Trip.com, and Canva.

Wordsmith's momentum reflects the pace at which enterprise legal teams are rethinking how work gets done. Wordsmith will use the funding to accelerate development of its AI platform, scale towards 300 people globally by the end of the year, double down on the US market, and support growing demand from corporate legal departments looking to bring more work in-house, reduce spend on outside counsel, and measure legal's impact across the business.

The legal AI market is splitting. Some products are built for law firms, where the business model is producing more legal work and billing for it. Others are assistants or copilots built to help individual lawyers draft, review, and answer faster. Wordsmith is built for a different market: in-house legal teams, whose job is to help the business move faster, manage risk, keep more work internal, and decide what truly needs outside counsel.

"Legal does not need another filing cabinet, and it does not need another copilot that simply helps one lawyer work faster," said Ross McNairn, CEO and co-founder of Wordsmith. "Wordsmith is the front door that does the work. Requests come in, AI agents process the routine, lawyers approve what needs judgment, and every step is recorded as it happens. We are building the system Legal runs on: one place where work comes in, gets owned, gets completed and measured."

The platform is organized around four actions: Receive, Route, Resolve, and Record. Every request, whether it starts in email, Slack, Salesforce, Teams, or an informal business question, lands in one place. Each request arrives with ownership, priority, and context attached. Wordsmith applies the legal team's playbook and handles the routine work, while stopping and handing work to a lawyer when real risk or judgment is required. Every step is captured as it happens: what was decided, by whom, and on what basis.

Jean Tardy-Joubert, Partner at Highland Europe comments: "What is most exciting about Wordsmith is that this is a tool built for companies, rightfully involving all employees in legal affairs, in coordination with the in-house legal team. By taking a vertical approach, Ross and the Wordsmith team have established themselves at the forefront of the sector, with demonstrable market traction, impressive growth and more than 500 satisfied customers."

Wordsmith was founded by CEO Ross McNairn, CTO Volodymyr Giginiak, and COO Robbie Falkenthal. McNairn is a former lawyer turned technology executive who helped scale Perk from $1m to $200m in ARR and previously held senior roles at Skyscanner before its $1.7 billion exit. Giginiak spent more than a decade at Facebook and Instagram and over six years at Microsoft. Falkenthal spent more than six years at KPMG Dublin and later held senior leadership roles at Perk.

About Wordsmith AI

Wordsmith is the new standard for in-house legal. Its system of action codifies a legal team's judgment and carries work from request to resolution: receiving requests from across the business, routing them with context, resolving routine work with AI agents and approved playbooks, bringing in lawyers when judgment is needed, and recording every step as work happens. Wordsmith is built for in-house legal teams that need to move at the speed of the business while maintaining trust, control, and defensibility.

About Highland Europe

Highland is a growth-stage investment firm headquartered in London, with an office in Geneva. Founded in 2012, the firm invests in rapidly growing technology companies across Europe, focusing on businesses with strong annualized revenues and the ambition to build category-defining outcomes. Highland has backed more than 80 companies across its history, including n8n, Nabla, Camunda, Wolt, GetYourGuide, WeTransfer, Nexthink, ContentSquare, Bending Spoons, Huel and 9fin. With over three decades of investment experience across Europe and the United States, Highland brings operational depth, global networks, and an unswerving commitment to the founders it backs. For more information, visit highlandeurope.com.

Media contacts
Josef Laor, TellNY
[email protected]

SOURCE: Wordsmith

Source: Wordsmith

Share: