Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Well, it looks like Norm Ai will guard the guards, or AI agents in this case.
The legal and compliance automation platform has just raised $48m in funding to do this. It provides its own agents to perform regulatory tasks, but the more interesting bit here is that its agents will police other agents! Maybe the agents you have in your business….
Or, as the company explained: ‘Today, Norm Ai agents primarily work behind the scenes to deliver proactive compliance in core enterprise workflows. Soon, interacting with AI agents will be a part of daily life, presenting enormous regulatory and compliance challenges alongside incredible opportunities.
‘Norm Ai agents also work alongside other AI agents. Here, the role of the Norm Ai agent is to automatically ensure that business actions other AI agents take are in compliance with laws.’
Investors included Coatue (which is also an investor in DeepJudge – see story before this one), Craft Ventures, Vanguard, Blackstone Innovations Investments, Bain Capital, New York Life Ventures, Citi Ventures, TIAA Ventures, and Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce. The new cash brings the total funds raised to $87m over the past 18 months…which is a lot for a legal tech company you’ve probably never heard of before.
(And on that point about companies that many in the market may not have heard of suddenly zooming into centre stage with a massive shower of VC money….well, welcome to legal tech circa 2025 in the age of legal AI….)
But, back to Norm itself.
Its tech solution is built with their ‘Legal Engineering Automation Platform (Leap)’, a proprietary system for creating AI Agents with legal and regulatory domain expertise. ‘Leap empowers lawyers and ex-regulators at Norm Ai to convert complex policies into operational AI systems powered by Large Language Models,’ they added.
The company explained that it ‘seeks to transform how enterprises handle legal, regulatory and industry requirements’ using a ‘compliant by design’ approach that integrates checks into ‘AI-generated content, internal communications, agreements, and marketing materials’.
John Nay, Founder and CEO of Norm Ai, commented: ‘We built Norm Ai to turn regulatory requirements, legal obligations, and corporate policies into intelligent systems that can be embedded directly into business workflows, reducing what used to take days into minutes. This strategic investment accelerates our research and development across legal and regulatory frameworks to meet demand for AI compliance solutions.’
Philippe Laffont, Founder of Coatue, a key investor, said: ‘We are thrilled to invest in Norm Ai and John. Norm’s innovative approach to automating compliance reviews allows them to continue to define regulatory AI. This investment reinforces our conviction in their vision and technology.’
P.S. They’ve just hired Troy Paredes as Senior Policy Advisor and Head of Capital Markets Strategy. From 2008-2013, he was a Commissioner of the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
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You can find more about Norm Ai here.
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If you’re a fan of Classical sayings….’Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?‘ = ‘Who will guard the guards themselves?’ Often used in relation to the idea of who would be policing the Praetorian Guard during the Roman Empire, given that they were the ‘State police’ themselves.
This article is all about regulatory and compliance agents, and not especially powerful ones either. But, as time goes by, it makes one wonder how far agents will become part of our daily lives, and what they will be tasked with…..and then, as Norm Ai is seeking to do, how we’ll figure out the best way to control them once they’ve been let loose.
