Parley - Why We Invested
We’re thrilled to announce our investment in Parley, founded by Philip Smart, Ian Edwards and Jackson Perry, that’s transforming the way lawyers handle document-heavy processes like visa applications.
Here’s why we believe Parley’s team has what it takes to stand out in the rapidly growing AI-powered legal tech space.
What is Parley?
Parley is an AI platform that saves 20+ hours of work per visa by streamlining the reading, summarizing and writing of visa applications. Parley leverages LLMs to tackle the most time-intensive parts of visa applications, freeing up lawyers to spend more time… doing whatever they want.
The Opportunity
When immigration lawyers work on visa applications, they spend most of their time reading, summarizing and writing. The three tasks LLMs are best at.
Immigration lawyers, in particular, work on a flat-fee model. This means that lawyers are incentivized to do the best work they can, as quickly as they can.
With ChatGPT and OpenAI now household names, everyone knows that they need to understand and adopt AI if they want to keep up. The legal sector has historically been slow to adopt innovation, but this is changing with AI.
These three things mean that widespread LLM use is inevitable. In the next few years, any lawyer wanting to stay ahead of the competition will be using LLMs to assist with the bulk of their reading and writing.
But why not just use ChatGPT?
A crucial question I always ask myself when assessing the long-term viability of generative AI startups is:
“If LLMs get 10x better, is that good news for this startup?” – a loose quote I borrowed from Sam Altman
In many cases, better LLMs mean generalist tools like ChatGPT will devour the problem the startup is trying to solve. For Parley, however, as LLMs get better, the platform becomes even more useful.
Parley integrates directly into the workflows of immigration lawyers as they process large volumes of complex documents. A generalist chat interface is not suited to drawing from hundreds of pages across multiple documents. Parley is purpose-built for this task and as LLMs get better, the drafts that Parley writes will continue to get better.
The Founding Team
Parley is of course not the only team that sees widespread LLM use by lawyers as inevitable. But competitors generally fall into one of two camps:
First, there are lawyers who deeply understand the problem but lack the technical expertise to build scalable solutions. Parley reached feature parity within just two months.
Secondly, there are experienced tech founders who can build well but don’t understand lawyers and don’t want to sell to them. They are taking the approach of building venture-backed, tech-forward law firms from the ground up.
Building a category defining company in this space is going to require a team who: is deeply technical; understands what lawyers need; and isn’t afraid to sell directly to them.
This is the team Parley has. They started this summer in YC and, in just a few months, built a best-in-class product. Along with this technical ability, the founder, Philip Smart, is the son of an immigration lawyer and so he understands what lawyers need from Parley and how to sell to them.
The rapid progress and adoption of AI will continue to drive change in the legal tech space. But what won’t change is the importance of understanding how to fit into legal workflows and the nuances of selling to an industry that’s historically slow to adopt new technology.
This is why we are excited to invest in Parley and watch them transform the way lawyers work.
