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August 27 2025
At Maple VC, we don’t just invest early. We invest first.
Bench IQ is reshaping the practice of law. The company has built a dataset and AI agents to help attorneys better understand their judges: what factors drive rulings, what irritates them, even how they like arguments to be framed. For lawyers, this is game-changing intelligence.
Today, Bench IQ has announced a $5.3M funding round co-led by Battery Ventures and Inovia Capital. This raise will enable the team to focus on giving litigators what they call "judicial intelligence"—the ability to understand how a judge thinks by uncovering and analyzing the 97% of rulings that never result in a written opinion.
Maple was the first to conviction in 2023 and wrote the first check.
The Maple VC Investment Frameworks
The Talent Framework
We believe every great company is built by a combination of three archetypes:
- Inventors spark breakthrough ideas.
- Builders attract people and capital.
- Operators scale them into enduring companies.
Most investors gravitate to Inventors or Operators. But we’ve learned that Builders are the most underestimated and most important. Builders don’t just talk about ideas—they bring them to life and attract the others around them.
In Bench IQ, we saw that rare Builder energy.
- Maxim Isakov (Engineering / Inventor): Max was a founding engineer at ROSS Intelligence, where he invented the world’s first text summarizer for legal cases and helped pioneer AI in law. After sharpening his craft at OpsLevel alongside PagerDuty’s earliest engineers, he saw the chance to team up again with his longtime friend Jimoh—someone he says he’d “follow into war.” For Max, Bench IQ is both an opportunity to invent again and a way to finish the mission he started at ROSS: using AI to transform how the law is understood.
- Jimoh Ovbiagele (Product / Builder): Most would put Jimoh in the Inventor bucket—he was the CTO and co-founder of ROSS Intelligence, where he originated the idea and helped pioneer AI for legal research years before it was mainstream. For his contributions, he was named to Forbes 30 Under 30 and the ABA’s Legal Rebels list. But what stood out to us was how he responded when ROSS was forced to shut down after a lawsuit: instead of walking away, he doubled down. That resilience is why, when veteran Kirkland & Ellis partner Jeffrey Gettleman had the idea for Bench IQ, he pitched Jimoh to lead it—saying he knew within 10 minutes that Jimoh was the person he wanted to build with. To us, Jimoh was always a Builder—his experiences and reputation in the space have led to this moment of true founder-market fit.
- Jeffrey Gettleman (Domain expert / Operator): Jeff spent 17+ years at Kirkland & Ellis, where he saw firsthand how understanding your judge could change the outcome of cases—yet the vast majority of judges’ rulings do not result in written opinions explaining their reasoning. After experimenting with alternative data sources on judges on major bankruptcies, he realized there was a powerful dataset waiting to be created. A non-traditional lawyer with a background in marketing and product, Jeff searched widely for the right partner to build with. When he met Jimoh, he said he knew within 10 minutes he was the person to lead the effort.
Together, they combine vision, product ambition, and industry credibility: the Builder who can rally top tech talent, and the Operator with decades of domain depth.
And their conviction is magnetic. Within weeks, they’d attracted backers ranging from top-tier VCs and angels to some of the world’s most prestigious law firms. We co-led the round with our friends Semil and Aashay at Haystack, joined by Jason Boehmig (CEO of Ironclad), Qasar Younis (CEO of Applied Intuition and former COO of YC), and top AmLaw 100 firms including Cooley, Fenwick, and Wilson Sonsini. That range—from legit startup founders to AmLaw 100 partners—says everything about their ability to build at the intersection of law and technology.
The Investment Framework
When we evaluate a company at the earliest stage, we ask six questions:
- Tech: Is this a 10x better solution?
- Timing: Why now?
- Monopoly: Can they dominate a niche?
- Distribution: How will they reach customers?
- Defensibility: What protects them long-term?
- Secret: What do they believe that others don’t?
Here’s how Bench IQ stacked up:
- Tech: AI applied to a new data source that incumbents like Westlaw and LexisNexis don’t have.
- Timing: Only now is this possible. LLMs can finally gather and parse the data they collect at scale; bankruptcies are projected to surge; and lawyers are embracing AI (82% believe it should be applied to legal work).
- Monopoly: Starting with bankruptcy law—a $1.4B niche—before expanding into the $128B U.S. litigation market.
- Distribution: A rare path: licensing APIs to incumbents like Thomson Reuters, embedding Bench IQ inside Westlaw’s own suite.
- Defensibility: Network effects. More attorneys using Bench IQ = more data collected and processed = better insights for the next firm = a cycle that could make Bench IQ a standard, not an option.
- Secret: The reasons behind judges’ rulings can be reconstructed—but the data has been too costly to gather and analyze, so no one else is looking.
Why We Wrote the First Check
We were introduced to Jimoh in May 2023 by our LP and friend, Karam Nijjar at Inovia. Over three months, we got to know him, his co-founders, and the opportunity ahead. We did references with ROSS employees, spoke with law firms like Cooley and Wilson Sonsini, and pressure-tested the market with other investors.
By August, we had conviction. Maple led the round with a $750K check—before other firms came in. Our conviction was high across every dimension we evaluate—founder grit, market timing, beachhead strategy, distribution potential, and more. But what stood out most was Bench IQ’s insight around reconstructing judicial reasoning with the potential for powerful network effects. If Bench IQ succeeds, it won’t just be another legal tech tool—it could establish a new standard for how the law itself is practiced.
“What stood out right away with Andre was his energy and optimism. It quickly became clear he also had grit, a solutions-oriented mindset, and the independence of thought I look for in a partner. Building a company isn’t a straight line — you need people who lean into the hard problems and stay positive along the way. A startup is a long journey, and ultimately I asked myself: is this a person I want alongside me for that journey? My answer was yes.”
Jimoh Ovbiage, CEO, Bench IQ
Where Bench IQ is Headed
Bench IQ’s ambition is clear: to become the new baseline for how lawyers practice. Judicial intelligence represents a new capability in law, one with the potential to reshape everything from bankruptcy to litigation. If Bench IQ succeeds, the same way Westlaw and Lexis became table stakes for law firms, Bench IQ could become the standard for judicial intelligence.
We’re proud to have been Bench IQ’s first believer—and excited to have Battery Ventures and Inovia alongside us for the journey ahead.
At Maple VC, First Check isn’t just about investing early. It’s about backing Builders—before the world sees what they see.
Written by: Andre Charoo and Jane Lee