EvenUp: Providing equal access to justice with AI

When EvenUp Co-Founder and COO Raymond Mieszaniec was a child, a catastrophic car accident left his father with a permanent disability. Like many immigrant families, this was Ray’s family’s first major experience with navigating the justice system.

Pressured by the desire to end the years-long case sooner and pay the mounting bills, Ray’s family settled with the liable party’s insurance company for what seemed to be a satisfactory offer at the time. Still, Ray’s family received a mere fraction of what the payout could have been: with the right data points and resources, the case could have been worth over twice as much as they originally thought. Unfortunately, Ray’s story is all too common.

“Surprisingly, the personal injury industry remains enshrouded in opacity, resulting in fair outcomes being largely left to chance,” said Rami Karabibar, CEO and Co-Founder of EvenUp. “One glaring illustration of this is when we observe two cases with similar injuries settle for multiples apart.”

Of the estimated millions of injury claims filed annually, 99% of cases are settled privately, making it hard for plaintiffs and personal injury (PI) attorneys to know how much their specific case is worth settling for. Furthermore, the claims process often takes over a year to reach a resolution, creating a painful and disruptive experience for families.

“We firmly believe the future of personal injury lies in transparency,” Rami added.

In fact, the company’s co-founders, CEO Rami Karabibar, COO Raymond Mieszaniec, and CPO and former litigation attorney Saam Mashhad are on a mission to level the playing field in the legal system—hence the name “EvenUp.” With the help of AI, they provide equal access to justice for personal injury cases no matter a person's background, income, or access to quality representation.

“In the face of a catastrophic accident, my family’s struggle for justice and fair compensation revealed the flaws in traditional systems,” said Raymond Mieszaniec, COO and co-founder of EvenUp. “By harnessing the potential of technology, we can create a future where the pursuit of justice is not marred by financial pressure or the representation you have.”

We are thrilled to lead EvenUp’s $50.5 million Series B, along with Bain Capital Ventures (BCV), legal tech leader Clio, and existing investors SignalFire, NFX, and DCM. With hundreds of law firms using EvenUp today, we see EvenUp’s first-mover advantage with its AI platform and rapidly growing data moat as key pillars of an enduring vertical SaaS business.

Evening up the playing field for plaintiffs

EvenUp’s flagship product creates AI-powered demand packages for personal injury (PI) law firms. A demand package is what the plaintiff’s attorney sends to the liable party and includes an overview of the case, the argument for liability, a proposed settlement value based on damages incurred, and supporting medical documentation and incident reports. Putting together a demand package is a time-consuming, labor-intensive, and error-prone process, particularly for resource-constrained PI attorneys. A demand package requires hours of manual reviews of medical records and bills; coordination amongst case managers, paralegals, and third-party service providers; best-guess estimates of damages; and the summarization of potentially hundreds of pages of documents into a case. It is also difficult to estimate a case’s fair value given the scarcity of available data on similar precedents.

That’s where EvenUp comes in. EvenUp generates high-quality demand packages by leveraging AI to accurately review documents and extract relevant medical information and bills. Furthermore, EvenUp’s proprietary database leverages over 250,000 public verdicts and private settlements to inform its analysis of the case’s true merit and value. EvenUp’s platform then leverages large language models (LLMs) to summarize the data and exhibits into a case narrative for the demand letter. The result is a high-quality, customized demand package for each case that equips the plaintiff and their attorney with the best chance of attaining a faster settlement with the fairest outcome.

“We've dedicated years to build technology to combat the fatigue that collects around repetitive, difficult, and uncertain tasks, all while pushing the boundaries of settlement practice and intelligence,” said Saam Mashhad, CPO and co-founder of EvenUp. “Now, we’re excited that Litty, our new AI platform, will give personal injury practitioners the tools to move faster, claim bigger, and channel their talents towards advocating for injury victims.”

EvenUp already empowers hundreds of law firms today to attain better outcomes faster for their clients. When we spoke with these customers, the efficacy and love of EvenUp were immediately clear, with resounding positive feedback on the significant ROI and customer experience (“I’m never going back to the old way again”) that was even apparent before the first day of using the product (“once I saw the demo, it was hard to say no”). That kind of customer delight is unusual and remarkable, and it affirmed our conviction in this opportunity and this incredible team.

A significant technological leap forward for law firms in the age of AI

We at Bessemer Venture Partners have spent decades investing in vertical software and have had the opportunity to partner with industry-defining companies like Toast (restaurants), Shopify (e-commerce), Procore (construction), and ServiceTitan (trades like plumbing, electrical, and HVAC) over the years; in particular, our long-held conviction on the opportunity for technology to transform the legal landscape led us to partner with innovative companies pushing the boundaries of legaltech such as CS DISCO, Litify, and Clio.

And, in this paradigm-shifting era of AI, we are more committed than ever to identifying and supporting the best vertical software players that can leverage this jaw-dropping technology. AI is transforming knowledge work, and law is among the industries best-positioned to benefit. Machines can summarize thousands of pages of documents, catch details that the human eye misses, and draft well-crafted prose at human-quality levels. Machine learning and AI are providing lawyers and paralegals superpowers, enabling them to create higher quality work products in a fraction of the time - and the productivity improvements are exponential, not incremental. We are excited by the data we’re seeing around how quickly legal professionals are embracing the power of this technology, and are even more thrilled to partner with who we see as the next disruptor in legal technology. We look forward to supporting Rami, Ray, Saam, and the full team at EvenUp in their journey of delivering AI to personal injury law and beyond.