Robert Ambrogi Blog
In a deal they say makes them the leading AI-powered e-discovery platform, the companies Reveal and Brainspace have merged under the Reveal name, backed by an investment of more than $200 million by investment firm K1 Investment Management, which is taking a majority stake in the company.
K1, which specializes in investments in high-growth enterprise software companies, is the same firm that two years ago made a $200 million strategic investment in Onit, a Houston company that provides enterprise workflow products for legal management, contract management and business process automation.
Chicago-based Reveal, founded in 2008, is a global company whose AI-powered platform offers a full range of e-discovery capabilities, including processing, early case assessment, review, infrastructure and artificial intelligence.
Last August, it acquired the AI technology company NexLP. In September, it announced that it had hired George Socha, cofounder of the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM), the framework that has guided e-discovery since 2005, as senior vice president of brand awareness.
Brainspace, founded in 2005 and headquartered in Addison, Tex., is a global provider of visual analytics for e-discovery and investigations. Its analytics provide tools such as clustering, communication analysis, conversation analysis, thread analysis, and concept searching.
With the merger, Reveal said, its customers will now have access to an entire suite that includes Reveal’s processing, early case assessment, AI and review functionality, together with Brainspace’s data analytics engine.
“The combination creates a technology powerhouse bringing together two leading artificial intelligence and analytics engines, propelling the next evolution of legal technology,” the company said in an announcement of the merger.
Taking On Relativity
With the merger, Reveal is setting its sights on the dominant company in e-discovery, Relativity, Wendell Jisa, founder and CEO of Reveal, told Business Insider. Ninety percent of Brainspace’s customers use Relativity, but Jisa now hopes to convert them to Reveal, he said.
The company also announced two global legal services companies that have signed on to use its technology: Epiq Systems and UnitedLex.
“Epiq has a long history of leveraging NexLP and Brainspace analytics to provide clients with differentiated methods and solutions, including portable AI models,” said Eric Crawley, vice president of Global Advanced Technologies and Managed Review at Epiq. “We’re excited to partner with Reveal as we continue to innovate around advanced analytics for legal technology.”
Reveal said that K1’s investment will be used to fuel growth, including expanding its sales and marketing teams, building additional functionality within the products, and hiring within R&D, data science and customer success.
“Backed by K1, Reveal’s merger with Brainspace has set into motion the next phase of AI innovation in the practice of law,” Jisa said. “Fueled by some of the world’s most powerful AI technology and underpinned by the Reveal review platform, we are ushering in a new era of automation in legal technology.”