Seattle-based legal tech startup Supio is making big plans to expand its local presence after emerging from stealth with a $25 million Series A round Tuesday.
The company has about 30 employees but is looking to roughly triple or quadruple the team over the next year, co-founder and CEO Jerry Zhou said. He added that Supio tries to hire locally as much as it can.
"Right now we're hiring as many people as we can," Zhou said. "We can't find enough great people to join."
The company aims to fill the downtown's six-story Westlake Place building, where it already has one floor, by the middle of next year. It has already signed a lease for an additional floor. The building, at 1520 Fourth Ave., has a total of 28,567 square feet of commercial space, according to the website of its owner, Stellar Holdings Inc.
The company previously worked out of the Colman Building on First Avenue before moving to Westlake Place in April.
Supio, founded in 2021, offers an artificial intelligence tool that specializes in personal injury and mass tort cases. The company says the technology helps clients find weaknesses in a case, get quick summaries, compare testimonies and find specific information from massive amounts of documents. Zhou said clients can ask questions and interact with the technology to better understand their cases.
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All but five of Supio's employees are based in the Seattle office, according to Zhou, with only sales employees working remotely. The company has open roles on its website in engineering, sales and product management, among others. Zhou said the company works in the office five days per week.
"I do think it filters out for the right types of people that can actually build a generational startup," Zhou said.
Sapphire Ventures led the Series A round, while Bonfire Ventures and Foothill Ventures participated. Sapphire's portfolio includes Docusign, LinkedIn and Square.
Before launching Supio, Zhou spent four years as a product manager at Microsoft working on Office 365, his LinkedIn page shows. He spent more than a year at tax software company Avalara before that. Kyle Lam, Supio's co-founder and chief technology officer, worked as an engineer at both Microsoft and Avalara before Supio.
As for the field of legal tech startups becoming too crowded, Zhou said that's more of an outside perspective. The legal market is so big, and the various legal areas are so nuanced, that there's plenty of space for new startups to coexist.
"It's kind of like saying you're a fintech company," he said. "Even as we focus on something like mass tort and plaintive law, and the datasets around this, this is a tremendous industry in itself just because of how much of a market share there is to grow."
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