Plenty of bottle as Genie AI targets major global growth

Registered in Cambridge, the legal AI startup tells Business Weekly it is already “aggressively hiring” for expansion – initially in the UK and the United States but over time across Europe and the Middle East.

Operating virtually a remote model currently, Genie AI executives meet weekly at different offices in the London area. Its current team of 32 is set to increase to over 50 next year with the addition of a London base and possibly a physical US office.

A platform for global growth has already been laid by the company, which is already slated for glory across multi-categories of Business Weekly’s 35th Anniversary Awards.

To date, Genie AI has drafted or reviewed documents on Genie for clients including 11 FTSE 100 companies, 20 Global200 law firms, a number of top US banks and two of the ‘big four’ UK supermarket chains. Contracts have been drafted in 120+ jurisdictions including the UK, California, Texas, India, Australia, South Africa, Singapore, France and Germany.

The current customer profile is 25 per cent UK based, 25 per cent US-centric and 50 per cent globally arrayed before the growth spurt. The vision is to become the global leading operating system.

Rafie Faruq is already helping to revolutionise the word of legal AI with bleeding edge technology from his brainchild – and world-renowned financial backers are sitting up and taking notice.

Founded in 2017, Genie AI has just raised $17.8 million from Californian investors Google Ventures and Khosla Ventures alongside London’s Connect Ventures.

The business is revolutionising the legal world by moving away from the sector’s traditional billable hour model and focusing on delivering value to customers. By making quality the north star, the platform enables law firms to draft legal documents in minutes instead of weeks – democratising access to legal contracts for all.

Genie AI is already used by over 100,000 companies which have collectively created 100,000 documents using its solution.

As well as the recent VC raise, Genie AI has also secured £1 million in government grants from Innovate UK – making it one of the largest recipients of such funding among the tech startup community.

Rafie is a remarkable young man – 33 years old, since you ask – and has more strings to his bow than simply being an outstanding tech innovator. Outside of work, he teaches meditation and advocates for the ethical use of AI, aligning technology with a vision of societal harmony, equity, and well-being over traditional measures like GDP.

His approach to leadership has fostered a loyal team, many of whom have been with Genie AI long-term. Notably, Genie AI was the only AI small business included in The Sunday Times ‘Best Places to Work’ list this year. Rafie’s organisational model is particularly compelling. His ‘1000 per cent Attack’ framework has tripled Genie AI’s output and speed and is regarded as a modern evolution of agile practices, not too dissimilar to the Spotify model.

Rafie says this approach focuses on maximising the attack surface and velocity of customer-facing ‘ while maintaining quality through internal-facing pods – ensuring tight alignment towards overarching goals.

He says: “The aim for Genie is to significantly transform the legal industry on a global scale, ensuring global commerce happens more efficiently and all businesses can access legal services at a reasonable price. For me, the greater mission is to harness technology for the greater good.”

Brought up in Cambridge, Rafie recalls a sense of not fitting within an educational system that he sensed was not optimal for a child’s development as a human being. Instead the young Rafie found intellectual and spiritual stimulation in books covering non-verbal communication, neuro-linguistic programming, and dream work.

At university, Rafie studied Philosophy and Economics at the LSE. He pursued Philosophy to quench his thirst for wisdom and Economics to establish a career that would enable him to financially support his family and understand the world.

At age 16, he worked as an Assistant Economist during the week and a salesperson at Currys weekends. After university, he worked by day for a Japanese investment bank as a bond and derivatives trader and by night created his first business with his flatmate – a viral charity donation company that accrued 10,000 users and provided £50,000 in donations. When it no longer aligned with his values, Rafie left to pursue an MSc in Machine Learning (AI), taught at UCL in conjunction with Google DeepMind.

Writing his thesis on Generative AI in 2017, a couple of years before the first GPT model was released, he specialised in generating structured text. “I recognised the biggest social and ethical impact we could have with those algorithms was with legal documents – the lifeblood of human and business relationships,” he says. The rest, as they say, is history.

Besides running Genie AI, Rafie conducts in-person and online workshops housed on YouTube, where he guides attendees in meditation, yoga, sound healing and mantra.

His passion for sharing combinations of spiritual modalities and ancient wisdom, which reconnect us to our true selves, is a crucial part of his life. While spirituality and Artificial Intelligence might seem counterintuitive, Rafie believes otherwise: “Western society is over-mechanising itself because that’s the best way to achieve GDP growth in a capitalist framework,” he says.

“We need to change our purpose as a species from ‘more is better’ to ‘balance and harmony.’ AI and over-mechanisation will, perhaps painfully, enable us to realise what it means to truly be human.”

As well as international expansion, Genie AI plans to use part of the new investment to improve its legal editor tool, which Rafie told Legaltech News was a “real-time collaborative, fully .docx compatible and privacy aware legal editor” with capabilities beyond Microsoft Word.

LegalTech News added that the latest investment came five years after Genie AI secured $2m in a seed round that brought sizeable angel backing, including from the former president of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, David Neuberger – crediting Techcrunch for the informational nuggett.