Robert Ambrogi Blog
ZERØ, a company whose AI-driven products automate time capture and email filing for lawyers and other professional services, has raised $12 million in a Series A funding round aimed at enabling it to accelerate market expansion and enter new verticals.
The round was led by Streamlined Ventures with participation from 468 Capital, AltaIR Capital, PBJ Capital, Gutbrain Ventures, s16vc, AiSprouts VC, Paul Grewal, and others.
ZERO’s suite of three products target “productivity automation” for professional services firms, designed to optimize the performance of knowledge workers. Its clients include many of the Am Law 200 firms, accounting firms, and leading financial services firms, it says.
The company’s flagship product, ZERO for Mobile, automatically captures billable time spent on emails and documents on phones and tablets. It also automates filing of emails into a firm’s DMS or Outlook folders.
Last October, it introduced another product, Apollo, that brings the functionality of ZERO for Mobile to the desktop, automatically capturing time spent on billable work on a desktop device and integrating the time entries into the lawyer’s existing billing platform.
See: ZERO’s New Product Automatically Captures Billable Time On A Lawyer’s Desktop Computer.
The company’s third product, ZERO for Desktop, automates email filing into a DMS from a professional’s desktop.
Ullas Naik, general partner of Streamlined Ventures, said that generic productivity and automation tools do not work for law firms and other professional services firms because of the security, compliance and regulatory requirements that govern their work.
“ZERO has targeted and garnered significant adoption in Big Law and has since expanded into other white-collar industries such as consulting and accounting,” Naik said. “We are very excited to have invested in each of ZERO’s financing rounds since their seed round and we look forward to helping the company become a significant market leader.”
Alex Babin, CEO and co-founder of ZERO, said, “ZERO is on a mission to improve knowledge workers’ productivity through the application of automation technologies and our recent round of funding provides further industry validation concerning the significant advancements we’ve achieved with our productivity automation platform.”
The infusion of new capital comes at a time of rapid growth for ZERO that has seen its revenue tripling and the headcount doubling in 2021. The company said new funding will allow it to accelerate market expansion and to enter new verticals with its AI-powered data classification engine as well as automation modules built on top of it.