Mishcon de Reya makes a strategic pre-seed investment in Ctrl AI

Mishcon de Reya announced a strategic pre-seed investment in Ctrl AI on 12 February 2025. Ctrl AI builds agentic AI for the data-heavy, high-volume work that legal teams handle in areas such as regulated disputes, real estate services and commercial operations.

Ctrl AI started within Mishcon de Reya, which invests in legal technology start-ups through MDR Lab. It is the second company to begin at the firm that Mishcon has gone on to back. The first was Kato, the commercial leasing platform co-founded by Mishcon Real Estate Partner Nick Kirby.

Ctrl AI was built for in-house legal operations teams at large and medium-sized enterprises. Its initial focus was high-volume disputes and regulated complaints, with the aim of cutting administrative work and speeding up case analysis, and on extracting information from large volumes of documents. The company already had a number of active engagements with enterprise clients when the investment was announced.

Anup Kollanethu, chief executive, and Nicky Pearson, chief product officer, founded Ctrl AI in 2024. Anup, a former strategic adviser to Mishcon de Reya, was previously head of legal operations at EY and chief executive of DWF Managed Services. Nicky held senior legal operations roles at Freshfields and Liberty Global.