We built the leading legal AI for M&A. Then we sold our own company.
Our team spent a decade building Kira into the category leader in contracts AI. At exit, 18 of the top 25 M&A law firms were using it, mostly on buy-side deals. We're now using what we built, and what we learned selling our own business, to help others sell theirs.
From Kira to Zuva. Keeping on rolling.
Founding Kira (2011–2018)
In 2011, Noah Waisberg, who had recently quit being an M&A lawyer at Weil, Gotshal, co-founded Kira Systems with Dr. Alexander Hudek, a computer science PhD grad. The problem: junior lawyers were spending enormous amounts of time (at vast expense) doing contract review work that seemed partially automable.
Scaling and selling (2018–2021)
The Insight raise let us expand the team from 100 to about 240. By the time we sold to Litera in 2021, Kira had 280+ customers in 50+ countries, was being used by 18 of the top 25 M&A law firms (mostly for buy-side diligence), and had been adopted by parts of all the Big 4. About 8 million documents had been analyzed across 57,000 projects on the platform. As part of the sale, we retained a copy of the underlying AI and about 30 of our roughly 180-person team. That became Zuva.
Selling Kira was its own education. It was a seller's market and we were likely the largest legal AI company at the time, but the process still consumed our leadership team for months. At one point there were 100 people in our virtual data room. Even with good advisors and a clean deal, it took a lot out of us.
The pivot to sell-side (2021–now)
Afterward, we reflected on two things. First, we were unusually well-suited to the M&A market: Kira was primarily an M&A-focused business, and Noah had been an M&A and private equity lawyer before co-founding it. Second, selling our business was genuinely hard on us. We wondered if that was typical. So we asked about 150 M&A professionals: executives who had sold companies, investment bankers, M&A lawyers, and private equity investors. Two questions: is selling a business really as hard as we found it? And if so, what are the biggest pain points? The answers were remarkably consistent. Yes, it's hard. And the same four pain points came up over and over. Zuva's sell-side offerings are built to address exactly what we heard. Our goal is that our users emerge with less "deal baggage" than we and the people we interviewed did.
The technology connection. Zuva's AI is built on the same underlying technology that powers Kira Systems, the AI many leading M&A law firms use for buy-side diligence. When we review your contracts, we're using very similar tools to what buyers will use when they look at you.
The people behind Zuva
Our review team has worked at leading law firms. They understand deal context, have a good sense of what matters and what doesn't, and their judgment is in every report we deliver.
Zuva's AI team has computer science PhDs and publishes research. We do real work on underlying models, as well as wrappers on top of general-purpose AI, depending on what the situation requires.
We raised $50 million for Kira and sold the business in a complex transaction that included a spin-out. Members of our team have also sold and raised money for other businesses, and advised on deals as lawyers and accountants. We understand what it actually feels like to run a company through a transaction.
All our employees are background checked. We are SOC 2 Type II certified. M&A deals are highly confidential, and we treat them accordingly.
Meaning behind Zuva
Zuva is a word from the Shona language meaning "sun," a symbol of light and illumination. We think light is an appropriate metaphor for our technology, which helps users see information that would be obscured without it.
The name also acknowledges our history. Kira, the name of our predecessor company, means "ray of light" in Sanskrit. We liked how "Zuva" carried a similar meaning in a different language.
Law firms: we can work together
As part of the Kira sale, we agreed not to provide UI-based contract analysis products directly to law firms until later in 2026. In the meantime, law firms can refer their sell-side clients to our services, and some of the best ones do. They do this because we help their clients get work done (like pre-diligence reviews and disclosure schedule prep) which clients might otherwise not get done due to cost.
If you're a law firm and have sell-side clients who could benefit from pre-diligence and disclosure schedule preparation at a fraction of what you'd charge, we welcome the referral and are happy to work alongside you.
Three ways to work with us
We pre-screen your contracts and prepare your disclosure schedules. Experienced M&A lawyers plus purpose-built AI, for about 20% of the Biglaw cost.
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Purpose-built Q&A management for sell-side deal teams and their investment banks. Import, deduplicate, track, and export bidder questions.
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Extract data from contracts yourself using our interface (Analyze) or build contracts AI into your own products via our API. 1,400+ built-in fields.
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