After a while, Danae Shell Get tired of hearing the same story again and again.
“Something bad would happen to someone at work, and the story always ended in the same way,” she said Techcrunch. “They just left, because doing something else was incredibly complex and expensive.”
You don’t have to look far to note that for many people the search for legal story feels so discouraging and complex that many just don’t try it. Even for someone with a mild technical job, the prospect of going against their company is discouraging.
Shell bothered that so much that she launched Valla in 2022, which wants to make legal support that is more accessible to employees.
The company focuses on labor law and since its launch, says it, more than 12,000 employees have successfully submitted complaints to employers and negotiated settlements.
“Valla’s basistthesis was:” If we can build tools with which someone can submit his tax return of his mobile phone, we can certainly build something that can help them manage their own legal issue, “said Shell.
Valla Platform enables users to collect their own evidence, generate documents and then talk to legal experts who “coach” them through what the legal process would be for each phase of their case. Shell said, for example, that a user can keep a constant problem at work, draw up a tribunal claim and then buy a coaching package to prepare for the provisional hearing.
Just like almost any other startup nowadays, Valla AI uses to streamline knowledge transfer. “The Genai engine on our platform acts as a legal secretary in the background,” said Shell. “It does everything it can, of informing the coach in the case, taking notes and actions during any calls and retrieving all admin and memories as the case progresses.”
Investors seem to like what they see at Valla: today the company said it had collected a £ 2 million (about $ 2.7 million) under the leadership of Ada Ventures. Active partners and portfolio companies, as well as recurring investors TechStart and Resolution Foundation, also invested.
Shell said that Valla started to use generative AI in early 2023 and in combination with the early traction that her product received, which investors helped to see the potential of her product.
The company will use the new capital to stimulate marketing, build relationships with trade unions and insurers and build more AI functions within the platform. After employment law, Shell said that the company hopes to expand to small claims and rent.
“Then we will broaden to other regions,” she said. “We are already looking at opportunities in the US and Europe.”
