Berlin-based Flank, a startup building autonomous legal agents for enterprise teams, has announced a $10 million investment round, bringing total funding to $18 million. The round was led by Insight Partners with continued participation from Gradient Ventures, and support from HV Capital, and 10x Founders. The investment will support continued product development, expand the engineering and commercial teams, and strengthen their enterprise partnerships.
Flank’s product is intended to take legal AI even further, acting on behalf of lawyers, rather than just as an assistant. In an exclusive interview with TFN, we asked Flank’s CEO and co-founder, Lili Breidenbach, about the platform, the problems it’s solving, and its future direction.
How Flank removes a legal bottleneck
Flank’s founding team combines backgrounds in law and AI. Breidenbach co-founded Legal OS, Jake Jones had been working in AI for eight years, and the third co-founder, Charlotte Kufus, left her PhD research at LSE to co-found Flank. Lili is a Berlin native and previously founded Legal OS after graduating from Reed College. Jake is a product designer, investor, and lifelong inventor. Charlotte left her PhD in collective intelligence at LSE to build Flank with her childhood friend Lili.
“As founders, we’re systems thinkers drawn to complex, high-impact problems,” Breidenbach said. “Legal is exactly that: deeply human, foundational, and bottlenecked by the need for expert input.”
The problem they aim to solve are the incredibly manual tasks that can dominate the legal process. Tasks like NDAs, DPAs, compliance forms, and vendor reviews, are essential, but repetitive, almost entirely manual, and provide relatively little return for the volume of work required.
Research by Gartner found that 63% of in-house legal work involved tasks like these, which were fact-based and following consistent, repeatable processes. But, despite the potential for automation, they were still being completed manually. Flank aims to unlock legal processes by releasing the capacity spent on these tasks.
Doing the hard work, not just providing a tool
Flank aims to replace current processes, not just provide a platform that helps manage it. “We’re not just replacing tools; we’re replacing the need for humans to do this high-frequency, low-leverage work,” Breidenbach explained.
Companies using Flank will use an embedded, enterprise-grade product. Rather than existing tools that at best support manual workflows, Flank replaces the manual work. Unlike chatbots or copilots, Flank’s autonomous agents resolve requests directly at the point of need — operating inside the tools already in use, like email, Slack, and Microsoft Teams. No new interfaces, extra software, or employee retraining are required.
Aware of concerns about AI, Flank agents have been carefully designed to be transparent, with robust systems to ensure accuracy.
Flank’s proprietary agentic framework (Flank-a0) and next-generation, vector-less retrieval engine enable breakthrough capabilities. The agent operates with the speed and fluency of an A-player hire — but with the ability to handle thousands of requests simultaneously.
The software includes the Flank-a0 agent, which can retrieve and act on legal information, but it is overseen by a supervision engine that combines both AI and human oversight. What’s more, rather than acting as a black box platform that generates outputs, Flank works within existing systems, using tools like Slack or MS Teams. “It’s remarkable watching a Flank agent work within email as if it were legal counsel,” Breidenbach told us.
The supervision engine, combined with its access to legal databases offers reassurance in its outputs, Breidenbach explained you can watch it “routing queries to colleagues, checking legal databases, and checking its own work.”
Flank’s architecture is designed to take over entire high-volume workflows (NDAs, vendor contracts, routine compliance checks), allowing legal departments to run leaner and redirect human expertise to strategic judgment and deal-making where it matters most.
A real-work impact of Flank
Flank is already seeing heavy, and successful use with in-house teams at several companies, including DeepL, SumUp, TravelPerk, QA Group, and Simmons & Simmons. At some it’s handing more than 5,000 requests a month that, previously, would have had to be managed manually by large legal teams. “With Flank, legal is finally on-demand: intuitive, effortless, and built into how our team already works. We didn’t have to teach a single person to use it,” Andrew Cooke, CLO at TravelPerk said.
Flank has already achieved triple-digit revenue growth over the past year and is hiring across product and technology to accelerate its ambitious roadmap. In addition, Flank has partnered with leading international law firm Simmons & Simmons, which has integrated Flank’s agent to deliver faster, more efficient legal services for their clients — a milestone in the adoption of autonomous legal intelligence by top-tier professional services.
Sophie Beshar, Vice President at Insight Partners, will join Flank’s board as part of the round. She explained how the impact the company is already having made it an attractive investment. “Flank is helping define a new category of enterprise software — autonomous agents that are embedded, invisible, and capable of real work at scale,” she said. “Legal teams are among the most stretched in modern organisations, and Flank’s approach unlocks speed, accuracy, and massive leverage without disrupting workflows.”
Shaping the future of AI as well as legal work
Breidenbach believes the support for their funding round highlights the potential. “We’re not publishing valuation figures, but the round was oversubscribed,” she said. “The signal is clear: we’re building something big.”
The company also looks different to the tech norm. Two of the three co-founders are women, as are 50% of the company leadership, and 60% of the board. Among the 25-strong team there are 15 different nationalities represented. The company is remote-first with hubs in Berlin and London.
The funding will expand their teams and accelerate their global growth. They already have hubs in Berlin and London, with offices opening soon in the US and MENA. “This funding gives us the firepower to grow fast,” Breidenbach said, “and keep partnering with the world’s most ambitious enterprises.” However, she is also keen that Flank represents more than just being an AI company.
With AI and tech sometimes causing as much concern as optimism, Breidenbach is aware how important products like Flank can be.
“In the early stage, tech still rewards pattern-matching over potential. If we’re not intentional, AI will further concentrate power,” Breidenbach said. “We’re at an incredibly malleable moment. Who is building, what we build, and how we build it matters more than ever.”
Flank’s main competitors are legacy workflows — overworking in-house lawyers, expensive external counsel, or legal managed service providers handling repetitive tasks. Flank’s focus is enterprise-grade autonomy embedded in existing workflows, something that has only been possible in the last 12 months.
Flank’s ambition is to have agents embedded across every enterprise, running the workflows that entire teams used to handle. Governed by experts; executed by agents. The company is building for global scale, with hubs in the US, Europe, and the Middle East, and the right partners to take them everywhere.
Breidenbach’s advice to women entering the field: “We’re at an incredibly malleable moment in history. Who is building, what we build, and how we build it — matters more than ever.”
