Covenant, an AI-native law firm built to serve private market investors, has announced a $4 million seed round led by Flybridge Capital Partners, with participation from Neil Barsky, a hedge fund veteran and media entrepreneur. The firm is pioneering a new standard for legal review, combining foundation model AI with elite legal verification to radically improve how LPAs, MFNs, and fund docs are processed.

The raise marks a critical step for Covenant as it scales its engineering and legal ops teams and builds more institutional-grade products for allocators, endowments, and sovereign wealth funds navigating increasingly complex private market legal infrastructure.

AI Meets Institutional Rigor

At the heart of Covenant’s platform is a deep AI pipeline built on multiple foundation models, ensuring outputs are flexible and always at the cutting edge. But unlike many legaltech tools that rely solely on automation, Covenant’s system is designed to route AI outputs through expert legal operators. The result: rapid document parsing and clause extraction that still meets the gold standard for compliance, accuracy, and defensibility.

The company has already achieved SOC 2 Type II compliance and anonymizes all client data - making it a strong fit for enterprise legal departments and institutional LPs who are increasingly held to rigorous data security standards.

Clients use Covenant to cut weeks of review into minutes across NDAs, LPAs, MFN processes, and due diligence workflows. But what’s particularly notable is how they’ve designed their product to serve an audience that traditionally resists change. Institutional legal teams don’t just need speed; they need assurance. Covenant delivers both.

The company’s go-to-market approach is quietly revolutionary. While most legaltech players try to “disrupt” from the outside, Covenant inserts itself into the internal workflows that legal teams already trust. Instead of making legal ops adapt to a new interface or style of review, it molds around their existing behaviors. This is key: workflow-native startups are harder to displace because they don’t ask users to change their habits - only their expectations for what’s possible.

That’s the lesson for founders building in complex B2B categories: don’t just out-innovate. Out-integrate. Covenant isn’t trying to replace the legal department - it’s amplifying its capabilities, lowering error risk, and removing the bottlenecks that slow deal velocity. By doing so, it becomes a non-negotiable piece of infrastructure.

Founder-Led Vision for a Next-Gen Law Firm

Covenant is co-founded by Jen Berrent, former COO and Chief Legal Officer at WeWork, and Richard Perris, previously General Counsel at global private equity leader CVC. Their experience navigating high-stakes, high-volume legal environments gives them an insider’s understanding of the gaps traditional firms and platforms leave behind.

The team isn’t just building faster tools - they’re rethinking the very model of a law firm. In doing so, they’re carving out a new category: AI-native legal infrastructure for asset allocators. The firm isn't billing by the hour. It’s building by the use case. That switch alone rewires the incentive structure between law firm and client - and it opens up new avenues for performance-based pricing, operational efficiency, and legal-as-a-service innovation.

Strategic Use of Seed Funding

The $4M seed will allow Covenant to expand its engineering, product, and legal teams. New modules are in development to extend coverage across secondary docs, fund admin workflows, and automated redlining. The company is also building integrations with deal pipeline and fund admin platforms to embed deeper into allocator operations.

The emphasis isn’t just growth - it’s precision. Every product release is tested with actual institutional users before going wide. This disciplined rollout strategy ensures the tools meet the expectations of teams that have zero tolerance for legal risk.

A Timely Response to Market Evolution

As more capital flows into private markets and deal velocity increases, institutional LPs are under pressure to act faster while maintaining their legal and fiduciary standards. Traditional legal review cycles - often built around static PDFs, email back-and-forth, and expensive hourly billing - are simply not built for today’s pace.

Covenant addresses this misalignment with a hybrid system: automation where speed matters, human review where risk matters. It’s this dual-stack approach that makes the firm both scalable and credible, particularly in an industry where relationships and precision are everything.

With this new round of capital and growing traction in the U.S. and UK markets, Covenant is positioning itself not just as a tech vendor, but as a legal operating partner to the capital allocators shaping the future of finance.