August Targets the Legal Middle with Configurable AI

When Joseph Parker talks about midsize law firms, he often thinks of the ones he grew up around in Richmond, Virginia: places where lawyers run into clients at football games or the grocery store. “These firms know their community and what they represent in it,” he wrote in a post announcing his company’s launch. “They deserve best-in-class AI tools.”

Parker, along with Rutvik Rau and Thomas Bueler-Faudree, co-founded August in 2024 to bring configurable AI software to midsize legal practices. The team met at Columbia University’s machine learning research lab and later worked across law, finance, and tech, including stints at Blackstone, DoorDash, and PayPal. That interdisciplinary background shaped August’s approach: build legal AI that adapts to each firm’s existing workflow, not the other way around.

On Tuesday, August announced it has raised $7 million in seed funding from NEA, Pear VC, and angel investors from OpenAI, Ramp, and Bain Capital Ventures, among others. The funding will be used to expand its modular AI framework, onboard more law firms, and hire across engineering, product, and legal roles.

A Platform for the Middle Market

Despite making up more than 50,000 practices worldwide and employing over 500,000 lawyers, midsize firms have historically been underserved by legal tech platforms built with large-firm infrastructure in mind. Many of those tools cater to AmLaw 100 firms with innovation departments and in-house IT teams. August aims to fill that gap with software that can be tailored to a firm’s size, jurisdiction, and document standards.