The last few months have been a particularly meaningful part of our journey. We wanted to take a moment to share what has been happening, what has gone out, and where we are moving toward next. 

A raise, and the conviction behind it 

In February, we announced £14M in growth investment, led by Mark and Lindy O’Hare’s Valhalla Ventures. It is their first investment since the record sale of Preqin to BlackRock.

For us, it is more than capital. It is validation of a view we have held for a long time: that AI’s value in legal drafting does not come from replacing the systems law firms already trust, but from being embedded safely within them. Quietly, consistently, and with the guardrails firms need.

The funding will accelerate our expansion into the United States and let us keep extending the platform so that more legal organisations can modernise drafting without compromising quality, governance, or institutional knowledge.

Meeting lawyers where they work

The Avvoka platform has always been where the real drafting work gets built – templates shaped, logic written, clauses managed, documents automated at scale. What we’ve added is a more natural way into that work, from the tool lawyers spend most of their time in.

In April, the Avvoka Microsoft Word Add-in went live on the Microsoft 365 Store. It lets lawyers work with Avvoka templates directly inside a Word document, and sync back to the platform so that automation continues where it should, in the system designed for it.

For lawyers, it means less context-switching and less friction in the day-to-day. For the platform, it means the work done in Word does not sit in isolation; it flows into the same governance, version control, and clause libraries that the rest of Avvoka already provides.

It is not a replacement for the platform. It is simply a more comfortable way in.

Closer to the people we build for

We were at Legalweek in New York, and alongside, we hosted our Logically Drafted event with our friends at Fried Frank, an off-the-record session on what complex drafting looks like at scale. One theme kept surfacing: with tech budgets under more scrutiny than ever, ROI is now part of every conversation. AI can get teams to a first draft faster, but that often just shifts the effort into review. The firms doing this well think carefully about where effort goes, not just where speed can be bought.

The best software is built close to the people who use it. In that spirit, we are introducing our first Customer Advisory Board: eight partners and practitioners from leading international firms, working with us to shape Avvoka’s roadmap.

It is a commitment by us to ensure Avvoka’s evolution happens with the firms using it, not at them.

A steady rhythm of progress

Behind all of this, the platform itself kept moving forward.

A highlight was the release of External Queries, which lets templates pull verified data at the moment of drafting, directly from the systems firms already rely on: internal databases, CRMs, Companies House, HM Land Registry. Documents now begin with verified data rather than copy-paste, and validation moves upstream, where it belongs.

Alongside that, the past few months have brought a steady cadence of smaller improvements: smarter template organisation, side-by-side questionnaire building, Client Forms for external collaboration, sharper controls in Massdraft, and refinements to Smart Automation and DraftAssist.

None of these are headline features on their own. Together, they add up to something we care about deeply: a platform that feels dependable, considered, and genuinely useful in practice.

Looking ahead

The legal sector is entering a new phase.

The last two years have been dominated by the conversation around AI adoption. We believe the next decade will be shaped by something harder: AI operationalisation. Applying these tools safely, consistently, and at scale, inside the governance frameworks firms already rely on.

That takes more than models. It takes structured drafting systems, strong institutional knowledge, and infrastructure built for high-volume, high-variation legal work. It is the problem we have spent a decade preparing for.

The next decade of legal work will not be defined by who adopts AI fastest.

It will be defined by who operationalises it best.

We are proud to keep supporting the firms shaping that future.

Eliot & David

Co-founders, Avvoka