Edinburgh-based legal AI firm Wordsmith raises $70m for huge scale-up

Edinburgh-headquartered Wordsmith AI, the fast-growing legaltech start-up, has announced $70 million (£52m) new funding to continue its scale up.

The funding from Highland Europe and Index Ventures among others comes alongside an expansion of Wordsmith’s product and new enterprise customer wins, including Sage and Starling. It follows a year of rapid growth for Wordsmith which is now used by more than 500 companies, including BT, Financial Times, Safelite, Trip.com, and Canva.

Wordsmith will use the funding to accelerate development of its AI platform, scale towards 300 people globally by the end of the year, double down on the US market, and support growing demand from corporate legal departments looking to bring more work in-house, reduce spend on outside counsel, and measure legal’s impact across the business.

“Legal does not need another filing cabinet, and it does not need another copilot that simply helps one lawyer work faster,” said Ross McNairn, CEO and co-founder of Wordsmith.

“Wordsmith is the front door that does the work. Requests come in, AI agents process the routine, lawyers approve what needs judgment, and every step is recorded as it happens. We are building the system Legal runs on: one place where work comes in, gets owned, gets completed and measured.”

The platform is organised around four actions: Receive, Route, Resolve, and Record. Every request, whether it starts in email, Slack, Salesforce, Teams, or an informal business question, lands in one place. Each request arrives with ownership, priority, and context attached. Wordsmith applies the legal team’s playbook and handles the routine work, while stopping and handing work to a lawyer when real risk or judgment is required. Every step is captured as it happens: what was decided, by whom, and on what basis.

Jean Tardy-Joubert, Partner at Highland Europe comments: “What is most exciting about Wordsmith is that this is a tool built for companies, rightfully involving all employees in legal affairs, in coordination with the in-house legal team. By taking a vertical approach, Ross and the Wordsmith team have established themselves at the forefront of the sector, with demonstrable market traction, impressive growth and more than 500 satisfied customers.”

Wordsmith was founded by McNairn, CTO Volodymyr Giginiak, and COO Robbie Falkenthal. McNairn is a former lawyer turned technology executive who helped scale Perk from $1m to $200m in annual recurring revenue and previously held senior roles at Skyscanner.