Headquartered in London, Avvoka supports legal teams globally who want speed without compromise and scale without loss of control.
LONDON – Legaltech platform Avvoka announced that it has secured £14 million of growth investment, in a funding round led by Mark and Lindy O’Hare’s Valhalla Ventures, marking their first investment since the sale of Preqin to BlackRock for £2.5bn in 2025. Established in 2016, Avvoka has been almost completely bootstrapped to date — the company had only previously raised £600k from angel investors.
Founded by two former Magic Circle lawyers, Eliot Benzecrit and David Howorth, Avvoka has grown by working with large, complex legal organisations, helping them turn precedent and institutional knowledge into drafting systems that can be reused, supervised, and improved over time. Rather than using AI as a replacement for existing approaches, the platform embeds AI within the rules-based automation frameworks that firms already trust.
Key points:
- Preqin founder Mark O’Hare makes his first investment post-acquisition via Valhalla Ventures, backing legaltech firm Avvoka, as law firms rethink how AI-powered contract drafting works at scale
- Bootstrapped from launch in 2016, the £14m investment is the first institutional capital into the company
- Avvoka works with over 20% of the AMLAW 100, including A&O Shearman, Fenwick, Fried Frank, Ropes & Gray
- The new funding will help deepen the capabilities of the platform, and accelerate US expansion
The investment follows a record year of expansion for the company, and comes at a pivotal moment for the legal industry. As generative AI moves from experimentation to operational deployment, law firms are confronting a new constraint: that drafting at scale requires structured systems, governance and oversight. Avvoka has spent the past decade building the drafting infrastructure required to embed AI safely into high-volume, high-variation legal work.
Eliot Benzecrit, co-founder of Avvoka, says, “AI has changed the pace of legal drafting. Client expectations have shifted, volumes are rising, and the old model of document-by-document automation no longer scales. What firms need now is drafting infrastructure – systems that embed structure, governance and human oversight alongside AI capability. That’s how you scale without diluting quality. Avvoka exists to build that infrastructure. We help legal teams turn their knowledge into structured, supervised systems that increase output while protecting their edge.”
David Howorth, co-founder of Avvoka, says, “We’re delighted to work with Mark, who has known the business for years, and believes in our approach and long term vision. Mark’s experience of building Preqin into a global platform made Valhalla the perfect fit for our next stage. This capital enables us to accelerate our US expansion and deepen the platform for high-volume, high-variation work while staying true to the principles that got us here: governance, control and respect for institutional knowledge.”
Avvoka’s LLM-powered automation engine turns a legal document into a template, automatically. Variables, clauses, and conditions are detected, while guardrails keep every draft consistent with a law firm’s existing standards. This makes the system uniquely suited to work that is both high volume, and high stakes.
To date, Avvoka’s technology has been adopted by over 20% of the Am Law 100 and leading global corporations including A&O Shearman, Fenwick, Fried Frank and Ropes & Gray, as well as in-house legal teams at Warner Bros. Discovery and other multinational businesses.
Mark O’Hare, Partner of Valhalla Ventures says, “AI is changing how legal work is done, but it won’t replace the need for robust systems. Avvoka’s attraction is their recognition that drafting is not a tool problem — it is an infrastructure problem. Firms that want to scale without diluting their expertise will need platforms built with that reality in mind.”
The new capital will be used to expand Avvoka’s US footprint and extend the platform’s ability to support high-volume, high-variation work without compromising institutional consistency and accuracy.
About Avvoka
Avvoka provides drafting infrastructure for modern legal teams.
Founded in 2016, Avvoka works with leading law firms and in-house teams to structure, scale and supervise complex drafting at enterprise level. The platform brings together advanced document automation, AI-assisted drafting and human-in-the-loop control, enabling teams to manage high-volume, high-variation work without losing consistency, governance or commercial oversight.
Rather than treating automation and AI as separate tools, Avvoka provides a unified environment where precedent becomes structured logic, logic becomes systemised drafting and drafting becomes a managed organisational asset.
Headquartered in London, Avvoka supports legal teams globally who want speed without compromise and scale without loss of control.
See more at https://avvoka.com
About Mark O’Hare
Mark O’Hare is the founder of Preqin, the alternative assets data and intelligence business. Founded in 2003, Preqin grew into a global platform used by institutional investors worldwide before being acquired by BlackRock in 2025 for £2.5bn.
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