The legal services industry generates hundreds of billions annually, yet operates largely unchanged from decades past, with private market investors bearing the burden of slow, expensive legal processes that delay critical investment decisions. Institutional investors managing trillions in assets face increasing complexity and compliance burdens across their portfolios, often waiting weeks for basic legal document reviews that could make or break time-sensitive deals. Covenant disrupts this landscape as the first AI-powered law firm built exclusively for private market investors, combining advanced artificial intelligence with expert legal oversight to deliver document analysis 5x faster than traditional firms while maintaining the same high-quality standards. The platform offers specialized tools including LPA review that delivers results in two business days, Most Favored Nation election analysis that reduces review time from hours to minutes, and fund manager due diligence capabilities. Since launching in January 2024, Covenant has built a client roster of leading endowments, foundations, and sovereign wealth funds across North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia that collectively manage over $200B in assets.
AlleyWatch sat down with Covenant CEO and Cofounder Jen Berrent to learn more about the business, its future plans, recent funding round, and much, much more…
Who were your investors and how much did you raise?
$4M Seed funding led by Flybridge Capital Partners, with participation from Neil Barsky, a former hedge fund manager.
Tell us about the product or service that Covenant offers.
Covenant, an AI law firm built for private market investors. Covenant’s limited partnership agreement (LPA) review platform is powered by advanced AI and legal advice to deliver a robust summary within two business days, outpacing any other alternative. By integrating advanced AI and legal advice, Covenant is able to increase deal velocity and unlock data insights with the same high-quality results as traditional law firms at a fraction of the cost.We also released the first AI-powered Most Favored Nation (MFN) election tool designed for limited partners. The time it takes for clients to analyze hundreds of pages is reduced from hours to minutes.Since its pioneering launch in January 2024, top-tier endowments, foundations, fund of funds, sovereign wealth funds, and other allocators have trusted Covenant as the only AI solution that can meet all of a client’s demanding accuracy, timing, and security standards.
What inspired the start of Covenant?
We founded Covenant because we saw the same inefficiency from opposite sides of the table. I had spent years scaling WeWork as Chief Legal Officer and COO so I knew what it was like to be an operator, trying to move fast but being slowed down by traditional legal processes. Richard, meanwhile, ran legal and compliance at CVC, one of the largest private equity firms globally, so he knew how investors felt when legal review became a bottleneck that cost time and money.We both saw that the way legal services were delivered hadn’t kept up with the speed and complexity of private markets. So we didn’t want to just layer AI onto an old model. We wanted to build an entirely new kind of law firm, one that integrates the best of advanced AI with expert legal oversight, so clients can move faster, spend less, and get deeper insights from their contracts.
Our mission is simple: with Covenant, private market investors should be radically smarter. That’s what drove us to build Covenant from the ground up.
How is Covenant different?
Many of the new legal tech tools are just layered LLM applications. They produce drafts, but they can’t stand behind the quality of the legal analysis. Covenant is an AI-powered law firm, meaning our output combines proprietary AI workflows with human legal oversight.We also use an ensemble of foundational models, which makes our outputs more accurate and resilient plus, we never train on client data, and we have strict SOC 2 compliance and anonymization baked in. In other words, we’re purpose-built for private markets not general-purpose AI so our clients get results they can trust.
What market does Covenant target and how big is it?Covenant’s target audience is private market investors. They demand radically faster, more cost-effective legal work that doesn’t compromise on accuracy or security. That’s where Covenant comes in to deliver intelligent document review, negotiation tools, and legal analysis that’s 5x faster than traditional firms with expert legal oversight integrated at every step.
What are the milestones you plan to achieve in the next six months?Over the next six months, our key milestones center on scaling to meet growing client demand while continuing to deepen the capabilities of our platform. We’re focused on expanding our product suite for private market investors. To accelerate this work, we’re actively hiring across engineering and legal, ensuring we have the expertise needed to build with both speed and precision.
