Pittsburgh Ventures

Last up today is Sonya Labs, the creation of Rodrigo Guzman, Nathan Collins, and Walter Chen.  These three Pittsburgh imports are creating the “Google of legal research.”

The legal profession today uses LexisNexis and Westlaw to find legal information to buld cases, but these resources are old-school, mostly manually based sources of legal information.  SonyaLabs is proposing to harness the power of algorithms to make the research process more efficient.  They are in the process of plugging in the large global database of legal information, and you can test out their alpha product, enfacto.  Still early days, but very interesting – and increasing the size of their database is their focus.

The most attractive feature about this company is their link to a large revenue stream – what legal professionals currently spend today on legal research.  And they are being smart about their go-to-market strategy:  they aren’t trying to kill Lexis/Nexis/Westlaw, but rather become the starting point for legal research.  If they can build enough value into their advanced tools solution, even a small piece of what is currently spent on legal reseearch makes for a nice sized company.

These guys wrapped up the day of demo presentations – and showed off what AlphaLab can be at its best:  a first-stage creation engine for innovation in the Pittsburgh region.