E-discovery start-up Everlaw raises US$62m

A cloud-based e-discovery and litigation platform has raised US$62m from Silicon Valley heavyweights.

Everlaw’s Series C was led by CapitalG, which is a new investor, and Menlo Ventures, which previously invested in the start-up. CapitalG is the growth equity investment fund of Alphabet. With the investment, CapitalG partner Jesse Wedler will join the company’s board of directors.

Andreessen Horowitz and K9 Ventures also participated in the round, which boosted Everlaw’s total capital raised to US$96m.

"The stakes for uncovering the truth and upholding justice have never been higher. Yet the process to find this information is incredibly challenging, and we want to give teams the tools they need to find the needles in the haystack — those critical pieces of evidence that change the trajectory of their cases," said AJ Shankar, founder and CEO of Everlaw.

He said that the investment will help the company grow, including through recruiting, international expansion, and investing in new features of their products and services.

Everlaw said that the “digital universe” is expected to reach 44 million gigabytes this year. As data grows exponentially, e-discover workloads also become more demanding, burdening litigators and investigators with cost and complexity of sifting through troves of documents.

“Evidence is the lifeblood of law, but only a small fraction of documents are relevant in any given case, which is why modern ediscovery is a new imperative for quickly uncovering that needle of truth in the haystack required to advance justice,” Everlaw said.

"Technology is well-suited to address today's data overload problem, and with their world-class engineering team and cloud-native product, Everlaw is enabling litigation teams to focus on truth discovery and leave the manual work to the machines,” Wedler said.

The start-up said that the e-discovery market is expected to grow to US$17bn by 2023. But Tyler Sosin, Menlo Ventures partner and Everlaw board member, said that e-discovery is “just the tip of the iceberg.”

“We believe that Everlaw can extend their product offering to customers, with purpose-built software that brings new efficiency to the legal sector,” Sosin said.

Everlaw also announced that it has been given a “FedRAMP Authority to Operate,” at the moderate-impact level, by the US Department of Justice. That means that the department can now securely implement Everlaw’s platform for e-discovery and collaboration, as well as document review for productions, investigations, and litigation.