Why We Invested: Norm Ai

We have been diving deep into verticals and AI and are excited about the opportunity for AI to revolutionize nearly every industry. Some key factors for success include a team that has deep domain expertise and the ability to fine-tune on industry-specific datasets, sometimes proprietary, to create true moats. We kept coming back to financial services and law as potential for highest impact, given the size of those verticals and the manual tasks that are required in the day-to-day.

Further, we’ve seen in the last 12 months CEOs of most major financial service institutions speak out about advancements in AI and how it will truly evolve their companies and improve efficiency of the entire sector. These companies have hundreds of near-term use cases that they have identified for generative AI and are eager to deploy. However, financial services is a highly regulated industry with very specific compliance requirements (which by the way, are changing constantly!).

Enter Norm Ai.

The company has built a Regulatory AI Agent platform, serving Chief Compliance Officers at companies from the Fortune 100 to smaller businesses. Norm Ai’s platform converts existing regulation into AI agents that can make autonomous compliance determinations, enabling teams to delegate tasks and validate the results in granularity. We saw a massive opportunity because of the willingness to pay and high engagement from large enterprise customers already, in order to make their compliance orgs more efficient and effective.

Norm Ai is led by CEO John Nay, who has spent over a decade researching the intersection of AI and law, most recently at Stanford, with published work in journals like Science. He was previously CEO of Brooklyn Investment Group, a quickly growing AI-powered investment software company and SEC-registered RIA where he is now Chairman. Along with the round announcement today, Norm Ai is establishing a Regulatory Advisory Board, consisting of former SEC commissioners, former White House regulatory affairs officials, General Counsels, and Chief Compliance Officers. We were impressed with John’s unique blend of deep industry relationships and knowledge, technical expertise in generative AI, and his ability to recruit top tier AI engineering/law talent and advisors.

Finally, while we are excited about the enormous opportunity for Norm Ai in financial services compliance alone, we also believe their innovative approach to converting law into code more generally, powered by LLMs, is applicable to many other regulated industries.

Today, we’re proud to announce Norm Ai’s $11.1m seed round alongside Coatue, Haystack, M13, Basis Set, and Atypical Ventures, as well as angels including the founding CEO of the Allen Institute for AI and a co-author of Open AI’s GPT-4.

Congratulations to John and the Norm Ai team. We can’t wait to see how you revolutionize compliance, AI, and law!

Check out their new website here (designed by Expa, more on that later!) and read more about the announcement here. If you want to be at the cutting edge of AI and law, see their job openings here.