NEW Startup from Twitch co-founder 🤖

Justin Kan launched a new company, with a fresh $65M round led by Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst, and YC's Continuity Fund.

This isn't Kan's first startup: he launched and sold live-streaming and gaming startup Twitch to Amazon for a cool billion dollars in 2014. Kan's been building for years as part of the first class of famed startup accelerator Y Combinator with Reddit's Alexis Ohanian, late internet-activist Aaron Swartz, and current YC President Sam Altman.

Kan's new startup, Atrium, wants to automate lawyers using machine learning. Since going through YC last winter and raising $10M last year, they've acquired 220+ customers, including bird-themed companies, MessageBird, SendBird, and Bird. 🐦

Many law firms are notoriously inefficient, charging clients by the hour to complete tasks that could easily be automated. In addition, most firms pay out any annual profits to shareholders, leaving nothing behind to invest in software or internal tools. "For example, one of its apps automatically turns startup funding documents into Excel cap tables," from a recent TechCrunch article.

Atrium isn't alone. DoNotPay, founded by then-19-year-old Joshua Browder, automates common legal needs using their chatbot. The bot was initially built to help people fight traffic tickets and has since expanded to handle 1,000+ legal problems. They've already beaten 375,000 traffic tickets worldwide.

Most legaltech startups are focused on selling software to existing law firms: Klarity just launched out of YC to help lawyers analyze contracts using AI, and Ravel lets lawyers compare firms, quickly search millions of case files and decisions, and even predict how judges will rule. 😳

Atrium isn't selling software. They're launching a completely new law firm. Only time will tell if they'll be able to beat the big firms at their own game.

Atrium 👔