Meet the new legal startup that Alex Spiro and Goodwin's top deals partner are betting on

• Marveri has emerged from stealth and secured $3.2 million to revamp corporate due diligence.
• The company aims to streamline document review, reducing months of work to minutes.
• High-profile lawyers like Alex Spiro and Larry Chu are lending their expertise to the founders.

Due diligence by young attorneys underpins every well-run merger or acquisition. It's also the bane of their profession.

A squad of associates might comb through thousands of corporate documents in a data room for weeks, hunting for the single detail that could screw up the deal after the parties shake hands.

Now, legal-tech startup Marveri has emerged from stealth, snagging $3.2 million in funding from Big Law lawyers and venture capitalists to cut months of manual review to minutes.

Marveri says it's building technology that's creating faster and more accurate corporate diligence: it sucks up all of a corporation's documents, then automatically renames, organizes, and analyzes them. One upload produces a digital map of what's in each document and how they're related, revealing hidden risks in the haystack.

Before starting Marveri in 2023, Connor Acle earned his stripes as an attorney in Morrison Foerster's corporate practice. He worked on everything from early-stage startup financings to T-Mobile's $26 billion acquisition of rival Sprint.

"We were given tasks that often even the best lawyers couldn't complete as accurately and as early as possible," Acle, now Marveri's chief executive, said. "I knew there had to be a better way."

The startup's investors include Masha Bucher's Day One Ventures, Bessemer, Alven, Lightscape Partners, Tectonic Ventures, K5 Global, Cadenza, angels such as Larry Chu (cochair of Goodwin's global M&A practice) and Yaacov Silberman (founder of Rimon Law), and a syndicate of early users.

High-profile litigator Alex Spiro — best known for helping Elon Musk defeat a defamation lawsuit and getting Alec Baldwin's manslaughter case dismissed — is advising the Marveri team.

Once a novelty, AI's incursion into the legal profession is now unmistakable — and relentless. A wave of startups is zeroing in on bread-and-butter tasks such as document review and drafting. Capital is flooding in: Harvey and Eudia have secured a combined $400 million in funding this year alone. Marveri's closest analogue, Hebbia, pocketed another $130 million last July.

Acle said dozens of firms from Big Law to Main Street firms have already adopted Marveri, though the company isn't naming many names. Like other legal-tech startups, it charges a fee to pilot its technology, allowing lawyers to try before they commit to a contract.

Yet Marveri's promise of liberating lawyers from drudgery carries its own threat. If software can complete months of a first-year associate's document review in minutes, firms may simply need fewer first-years.

That tension—easing the grind while chipping away at the very rung that many young lawyers use to climb the partnership ladder—hasn't escaped Acle, a former associate himself.

Young lawyers, he said, don't see Marveri as "a replacement" but as "a superpower" that lets them produce stronger work faster and wow partners and clients alike.

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