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Robotic lawyer startup DoNotPay raises $4.6M
Robotic lawyer startup DoNotPay Ltd. today said it has raised $4.6 million in new funding to expand its service into new markets.
The seed funding round was back by Andreessen Horowitz’s a16z, Greylock Ventures, Felicis Ventures, Founders Fund, Index Ventures, Tuesday Capital and a range of individual investors.
Founded in 2016, DoNotPay offers an automated lawyer chatbot app that challenges parking tickets, bank fees and unfair charges. Using artificial intelligence, the app discusses the circumstances of a parking ticket or other contested charge with users to ascertain the validity of a claim, then assists users through the process of lodging an appeal to the charge using publicly available information.
As of 2016, the app had helped users lodge successful challenges of 160,000 parking tickets in London and New York out of 250,000 lodged, a success rate of 64%. The creation of the app came about after DoNotPay founder Joshua Browder wrote software to contest 30 parking tickets he had racked up while living in London.
“I’ve been doing this for a while with no resources so we’re looking forward to expanding and helping more people fight for their rights in general,” Browder told Legal Cheek.
Some of the new services offered by DoNotPay have gone off in different directions. A recently added feature alerts users if they’ve been scheduled to fly on a Boeing 737 Max aircraft and attempts to switch the flight to another, less crash-prone plane.
The new funding will be used to expand the service to new users, the current offering only available on iOS, something Browder alludes to on Twitter.
We want to truly nail mobile first, but web will eventually come. Android is soon though!
— Joshua Browder (@jbrowder1) July 3, 2019
While officially a seed round of funding, the $4.6 million raised is not the first time DoNotPay has raised money. According to data from Crunchbase, the company previously raised $1.1 million, labeled at the time as a seed round as well, in 2017. Total funding to date for the company comes in at $5.7 million.
Image: DoNotPay
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