Ex-Wachtell Lawyer Wertman Secures $6 Million for AI Startup

Noetica AI, a startup software platform headed by a former Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz associate, announced Tuesday a $6 million seed investment round led by venture capital firm Lightspeed Venture Partners.

Lightspeed’s backing brings Noetica’s total funding to $7.8 million following a pre-seed round last year by Bling Capital. The New York-based company’s platform uses artificial intelligence to help lawyers access and compile complex financial documents for corporate debt transactions.

The technology is still not a “silver bullet,” though if used properly, artificial intelligence can be for lawyers what Microsoft Excel was to investment bankers, said Daniel Wertman, Noetica AI’s chief executive officer, who until last year was a corporate finance associate at Wachtell.

Wachtell, which saw partner Gordon Moodie take a leave of absence this year to become chief product officer for another AI-focused legal startup, Harvey, was an early adopter of machine learning in electronic discovery.

“It’s extraordinarily difficult to leave a firm as incredible and unique as Wachtell,” Wertman, 32, said about his former employer, an elite Big Law firm that last month ushered in its next generation of leadership. During his nearly five years at Wachtell, Wertman said he worked on a number of large transactions, including advising Allergan Inc. on its $63 billion sale to AbbVie Inc.

Wertman’s time at BlackRock Inc. prior to graduating from Harvard Law School and then at Wachtell helped him realize that technology could help law firms, lenders, banks, and investment managers in the corporate debt market, he said.

He said he was sitting at his desk at Wachtell one day and asked a senior lawyer how to access a market database to check if a borrower of a certain type could get specific terms. The answer? It didn’t exist.

Selling Tech

Wertman, who helped start Noetica in 2022, said he sees artificial intelligence as a paradigm shift for the legal industry, similar to what the internet was in the 1990s, the iPhone in the early 2000s, and social media during the last decade.

“Whoever adopts that most expeditiously, with the right approaches, will be well served in the short and long run for their business and clients,” said Wertman, who co-founded Noetica with Tom Effland and Yoni Sebag.

Selling a new technology to lawyers is not an easy process, acknowledged Wertman and Justin Overdorff, a Lightspeed partner who joined the venture capital firm two years ago from Stripe Inc.

But a generational shift within Big Law is moving many less tech-savvy Baby Boomers out of leadership roles and ushering in a cohort interested in using numerous new legal products, Overdorff said.

Word of mouth has helped Noetica grow its client roster, Overdorff said. “Once you sign a customer at a top firm, their tendency to tell colleagues of theirs at other firms is really high,” he said. “Nobody wants to be left behind.”

Lightspeed’s investment in Noetica will help the company expand its operations and the type of applications in its product suite, Wertman said. Noetica is part of a Lightspeed legal technology portfolio that includes document extraction specialist Butler Labs Inc. and EvenUp, which helps personal injury lawyers and earlier this year secured $50.5 million in Series B funding.

Noetica, unlike some other artificial intelligence startups in the legal space, doesn’t license third-party software from providers like OpenAI. Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati advised Noetica on its fundraising and serves as outside counsel to the startup. Wertman said non-disclosure agreements prevent him from disclosing the names of specific Noetica clients.