Bench IQ Raises $5.3M to Advance AI Judicial Insights in U.S., Canada

Bench IQ, a Toronto-based legal tech startup, has raised $5.3 million in seed funding to develop its AI-powered judicial intelligence platform that helps lawyers understand how judges think by analyzing 97% of federal judicial rulings that are not written opinions. The platform uses proprietary datasets and advanced large language models to capture and analyze court transcripts, oral rulings, and other judicial behaviors, enabling attorneys to tailor their arguments to individual judges' decision-making patterns rather than merely predicting case outcomes. Bench IQ's technology is currently used by four of the top five firms in the American Lawyer rankings and aims to expand its focus from federal to state courts while growing its team in both the U.S. and Canada. The funding round was co-led by Battery Ventures and Inovia Capital, with participation from CIBC Innovation Banking, MVP Ventures, Maple VC, and Haystack VC. Co-founded by Jimoh Ovbiagele, Jeffrey Gettleman, and Maxim Isakov, Bench IQ seeks to solve the longstanding problem of limited judicial insight available to litigators by providing actionable intelligence that goes beyond the 3% of rulings that are formally published in writing. This approach represents a shift in legal technology from automating existing work to unlocking previously impossible insights into judicial decision-making.