Parachute Raises $1.8M Pre-Seed to Bring AI Leverage to SME Law Firms

Australia’s legal tech ecosystem just gained a strong new contender.

Parachute, an AI-powered legal operating system built specifically for small- and medium-sized law firms, has announced a $1.8 million oversubscribed pre-seed round, signalling growing investor belief that legal AI is moving beyond global enterprise players toward practical SME adoption.

💰 Capital Raised & Investors

• Round: Pre-Seed
• Amount: $1.8M
• Valuation: ~$8.5M
• Lead Investor: Rampersand
• Co-Investors: Co Ventures, strategic angels and Australian early-stage investors

The round was reported as oversubscribed — a strong early validation of both the market opportunity and founder execution.

👨‍💼 Founders & Origin Story

Parachute was founded by Ryan Zahrai, alongside co-founders Dave, Vivienne, and Reed Li, after firsthand experience running an SME legal practice.

Zahrai’s insight came while operating his own firm, Zed Law — where he realised most legal AI platforms were built for enterprise firms, leaving smaller practices underserved.

The problem wasn’t just AI — it was trust, privacy, and systems designed for the day-to-day reality of lean law firms.

With a background in privacy and infrastructure, the team set out to build a platform where AI could be adopted safely within the high-trust environment required by legal professionals.

⚖️ What Parachute Does

Parachute positions itself as an AI-powered legal operating system, not just another drafting tool.

Core capabilities include:

🧠 AI-Powered Workflows

• Automates the first ~80% of legal work
• Drafting, reviewing, and issue-spotting in minutes
• Context-aware document generation

👩‍⚖️ Built-In Lawyer Verification

• Lawyers review and finalise outputs
• Clear pricing and defined SLAs
• Maintains professional oversight and compliance

🔄 Streamlined Legal Operations

• Client collaboration hubs
• Reduced admin overhead
• Workflow, billing and client management in one environment

The positioning is clear:

AI handles the heavy lifting. Lawyers deliver the judgment.

🎯 Market Opportunity

While global players like Harvey and Legora dominate enterprise legal AI, Parachute is focused on what founders describe as 80% of Australian law firms — SME practices needing practical leverage rather than complex enterprise software.

SME firms face unique pressures:

• Heavy admin workloads
• Margin squeeze
• Retention and scaling challenges
• Systems not built for small teams

Parachute aims to turn AI from a novelty into operational infrastructure.

📊 Early Traction

The platform is already being used by firms across Australia, with early users reporting meaningful efficiency gains.

One example:

“What used to take 2.5 hours now takes 20 minutes.” — Senior Legal Counsel, Zed Law

Early adopters such as Lazarus Legal highlight improvements in:

• Drafting efficiency
• Margin protection
• Faster client delivery
• Strategic focus vs admin burden

🧭 Why This Matters (BSiVC View)

Parachute reflects a broader shift in vertical AI:

• Moving from generic AI tools → industry-specific operating systems
• Designing for SME realities, not enterprise budgets
• Embedding trust, security, and workflow into the product from day one

In many ways, this is less about replacing lawyers and more about giving small firms the leverage historically reserved for big law.

That narrative resonates strongly with investors — and explains why the round attracted strong participation so early

Can we all please stop and talk about Anthropic's $30B Raise !

Great article by my friend , Leigh Golombik

Anthropic has just secured $30B at a $380B Valuation as Claude Code Revenue Surges. This Series G round makes one of the most valuable private tech companies in the world. This ranks among the largest private tech financings ever recorded, second only to OpenAI’s $40 billion raise.

The driver behind this record-breaking valuation? Real, accelerating revenue.

• Anthropic reports its overall annualised revenue run rate has soared toward $14 billion, up dramatically from the prior year.
• Much of this growth is powered by Claude Code, the company’s AI-driven coding assistant, now contributing over $2.5 billion in run-rate revenue more than double since early 2026.

So - what this means is:

💡 AI tools are becoming mission-critical for enterprises across industries. Claude’s growth is a case in point. 

💡 Competition With OpenAI Heats Up with both Anthropic and OpenAI pursuing massive private capital and potential IPO plans, the AI funding race may reshape public markets soon. 

💡 Anthropic has signalled plans for major data centre investments and expanded enterprise offerings, positioning itself as a full-stack AI player. 

At a time when many sectors face uncertain growth prospects, Anthropic’s funding round is a clear reminder that the AI ecosystem continues to draw outsized capital and ambition.

Whether unlocking developer productivity, transforming enterprise workflows, or redefining the landscape of tech giants, AI platforms like #Claude are at the forefront of the next digital revolution.

#ArtificialIntelligence #AI #StartupFunding #TechInnovation #EnterpriseAI #MachineLearning #VentureCapital #DeveloperTools #Claude #Anthropic #FutureOfWork

Serval: Taking Enterprise Automation with AI to the Next Level — Is It the Next Atlassian?

Founded in 2023 by Jake Stauch and Alex McLeod, Serval was built around a clear and ambitious vision: free IT teams from repetitive, low-value work so they can focus on higher-impact problems.

They have raised over 125m in 3 years from blue chip investors and is emerging as one of the most compelling AI-native enterprise platforms in the market, prompting an increasingly common question among investors and operators alike: could this be the next Atlassian?

Using an AI-native enterprise platform, the founders are redefining how operational work is automated and governed across large organisations.

Traction, Customers, and Capital

Serval’s momentum has been rapid and decisive.

Founded in 2023, the company has raised $127 million across three rounds:

• Seed (2023): $5m (including participation from General Catalyst)

• Series A (2024): $47m led by Redpoint Ventures, with support from First Round Capital, General Catalyst, and BoxGroup

• Series B (2025): $75m at a $1 billion valuation, led by Sequoia Capital

Sequoia has publicly noted that the last time they saw customer pull and horizontal platform expansion of this magnitude was during their early partnership with ServiceNow—an important parallel for enterprise software investors.

Serval has also secured blue-chip customers, including leading AI-native companies such as Perplexity AI, Mercor, and Together AI.

⸻

A different approach to Agentic AI

Serval uses agentic AI to automate IT service management—but with a structure designed to avoid the risks that concern enterprise buyers.

Instead of a single all-powerful AI agent, Serval separates responsibilities into two layers:

• One AI agent builds internal automation tools for tasks such as software authorisation, access provisioning, and device setup. This functions like a “vibe-coding” engine, overseen by IT leadership but capable of doing most of the heavy lifting autonomously.

• A second AI agent, the help desk agent, responds to user requests by calling only those pre-approved tools, strictly following the permissions and rules set by managers.

As Jake Stauch explained to TechCrunch:

“We want to make it easier to automate something forever than do it manually once.”

The result is powerful automation with full control, auditability, and enterprise-grade governance.

So, What Does Serval Do?

Serval enables enterprises to automate more than 50% of operational tickets using AI—without losing control.

Its automations are:

• permissioned

• auditable

• explainable

• fully governed

This allows organisations to safely replace manual workflows across IT, HR, Finance, Legal, Security, and Engineering.

Because Serval combines:

• an automation engine, and

• a system of record (ticketing, access management, asset management, workflow orchestration),

it becomes the central operating layer where work is created, executed, and measured—displacing legacy ITSM and workflow tools rather than merely augmenting them.

⸻

Growth Plans

Serval’s next phase is focused on scale, breadth, and category leadership.

Key priorities include:

• Horizontal expansion beyond IT into HR, Finance, Legal, and other operational teams

• Replacing incumbent systems of record, not just integrating with them

• Accelerating enterprise deployments globally

• Expanding talent density across engineering, AI research, and go-to-market

• Deepening AI automation to further reduce manual operational work

With revenue growing 5× in just 90 days, rapid enterprise adoption, and strong investor backing, Serval appears to be entering the steepest part of its growth curve.

⸻

Is Serval the Next Atlassian?

It’s too early for definitive comparisons—but the signals are familiar:

a horizontal platform, strong product-led adoption, blue-chip customers, elite investors, and a clear path to becoming a system of record.

If the current trajectory holds, Serval’s growth may only be just beginning.

Is Serval a home run out of the ballpark ?