Software company Text of Justice announced today the close of a $2.2 million seed round with participation from Bloomberg Beta, True Ventures, Reid Hoffman, John Legend and Michael Tubbs.
Founded in 2019 by Devshi Mehrotra and Leslie Jones-Dove, the company stores, catalogues, analyzes and then shares video evidence in hopes of increasing transparency in criminal cases, such as interactions with police, and improving overall court outcomes for those accused of low income. The product is intended for public defenders to operate in trials.
“As a technologist, I couldn’t necessarily influence policy or legislation, especially as a young person,” Mehrotra told TechCrunch. “But in terms of helping improve the efficiency of the work that public defenders do, that was very much in my wheelhouse.”
Mehrotra and Jones-Dove met seven years ago as freshmen at the University of Chicago. They both majored in computer science and were passionate about campus police reform. Three months after his freshman year, LaQuan McDonald’s video the murder went viral. At the time, it was the latest clip of a juvenile black man dying at the hands of police.
Mehrotra and Jones-Dove grew up watching Trayvon Martin the death caused a sensation on cable TV. A few days before the first semester of studies, the town of Ferguson, Missouri burned down after the murder of Michael Brown. According to data, since 2015, police have murdered over 1,500 black men Washington Post..
“I spent a lot of time during my studies thinking about the role of technology in our criminal justice system and how much of the technology that is created is disproportionately designed to facilitate arrest and incarceration,” Mehrotra said. “We wanted to do something to help our community.”
JusticeText automatically transcribes criminal evidence data, making it searchable by keywords, weapons, drugs and crimes, so lawyers can easily create videos for operate in hearings or trials. Currently, the company cooperates with 50 public defender offices and has approximately 60 clients who are private defenders in criminal cases.
The duo started fundraising in February, and Mehrotra says it took them about five months. She called the experience “rigorous” and said they rely on other founders and angel investors they meet at accelerators to lend a hand introduce them to enormous investors. The company will operate the money to further develop advanced natural language processing and expand its sales, marketing and communications teams.
“It’s rare to find founders who are also doing something as valuable to the world as unlocking our legal system and already getting customers to pay them for that value,” Roy Bahat, head of Bloomberg Beta, told TechCrunch. “Winning companies must do right by the world and do well. Devshi and Leslie do both.
The legend, singer and business angel, shared a similar sentiment.
“The American criminal justice system disproportionately harms communities of color, and we must equip our public defenders with cutting-edge tools to prevent and mitigate this harm,” he said. “I am excited to see how the JusticeText platform contributes to a world where everyone receives the representation they deserve.”
Mehrotra said reception to JusticeText has been positive so far. Public defenders in particular have become interested in the product, especially considering growing court backlogs amidst the pandemic. She said lawyers have already contacted us and pointed out that JusticeText makes their cases easier by increasing their bandwidth to take on more responsibilities.
This is critical because many low-income defendants remain in pre-trial detention due to a lack of available public defenders. Prison Policy Initiative estimates more over 400,000 people are in jail awaiting trial, many of them simply because they cannot afford cash bail. Overall, Mehrotra said the company’s goal is to move the needle – even just a little bit.
“We hope that we will be able to keep more and more people out of the justice system and be an intervention that can redirect them to rehabilitation programs,” she said. “We are proud to be creating technology that extracts critical insights from video in minutes, all with the ultimate goal of increasing transparency and enabling fairer outcomes in our court system.”