Jimoh Ovbiagele

TL;DR

Jimoh Ovbiagele is a two-time legal AI startup founder (ROSS Intelligence (Y Combinator Summer 2015) and Bench IQ) driven to solve meaningful societal problems—accessible legal services and transparency in law—using technology. For his contributions to legal AI, he was named to Forbes’s 30 Under 30 and the American Bar Association’s Legal Rebels lists. In 2014, while studying computer science at the University of Toronto, Jimoh co-founded a legal AI startup called ROSS Intelligence with Andrew Arruda and Pargles Dall’Oglio. ROSS pioneered AI for legal research to make legal services more affordable. The company raised $16.8M from investors, including Y Combinator, and was featured in publications such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. It served thousands of attorneys, from solo practices to AmLaw 100 law firms such as Dentons and Latham & Watkins. For his role as CTO and the idea’s originator, Jimoh was named to Forbes 30 Under 30 and the American Bar Association Legal Rebels lists. Unfortunately, in 2020, ROSS ceased operations due to a malicious lawsuit from Thomson Reuters, inspiring him and his co-founders to fight for public access to the law and fair competition in federal court. After ROSS, Jimoh took a two-year break from legal tech and entrepreneurship. In April 2023, he teamed up with Jeff Gettleman, a former partner at Kirkland & Ellis, and Max Isakov, ROSS’s first engineering hire and a close friend, to start Bench IQ. Bench IQ’s mission is to make the law more transparent by using AI to uncover how different judges interpret it. In the United States, judges publish the rationale for their decisions in only 3% of rulings, making the legal system difficult to navigate. So far, Bench IQ has raised $7.4 million from funds that were early investors in leading tech companies such as Instacart ($CART), Figma ($FIG), Coinbase ($COIN), and Affirm ($AFRM), alongside investments from AmLaw 100 firms including Cooley, Fenwick, and Wilson Sonsini. Jimoh and his colleagues are off to an exciting start and are committed to moving forward with their investors, customers, and brilliant colleagues to tackle one of society’s most meaningful problems.