Meet the legal AI startup helping David take on Goliath

Morgan Chittum here. The biblical story of David and Goliath is the most famous underdog yarn in history. Unsurprisingly, it is often invoked in the world of startups, where founders wielding little more than an idea and big dreams try to take on much larger and wealthier incumbents. San Mateo, California-based legal startup Eve is the latest example.

As co-founder and CEO Jay Madheswaran explains, Eve builds case management tools designed for small plaintiff-side law firms that represent everyday people looking to sue deeper-pocketed companies. For such firms, every new case can stretch those firms’ already-limited resources, but Madheswaran says his startup is leveling the playing field.

“This side of the market has been historically [and] drastically underserved,” Madheswaran told me. “Most of these firms are tiny.”

That imbalance starts with how lawyers get paid. Corporate firms have historically had the budgets to buy software and bill clients by the hour, Madheswaran said. Plaintiff firms, meanwhile, often represent people who cannot afford stiff legal fees that typically begin at hundreds of dollars per hour. Instead, those lawyers typically work on contingency: They get paid when their clients win. That means a small firm has to make each case economically viable, limiting which clients they can and can’t take on.

Eve’s answer is an end-to-end AI platform for plaintiff firms, rather than a tool focused on one step of a case. The idea is to free lawyers’ time across the legal process, allowing them to handle more cases with the resources they already have.

The number of cases managed on Eve’s platform has increased roughly 75% since June, surpassing 350,000 across nearly 2,000 plaintiff law firms at the end of September. More than 50,000 of those cases have already closed, resulting in more than $3.5 billion in settlements and judgments. All of this has helped Eve post a sixfold growth in revenue year over year.

The company is part of the increasingly crowded field of legal AI startups. Heavyweights like Harvey—valued at north of $15 billion—cater more to Big Law and corporate in-house counsel. But Eve’s focus on plaintiff firms puts it in a different lane—albeit not an empty one. EvenUp and Supio also target plaintiff-side practices.

Eve has also gotten the stamp of approval from Silicon Valley’s top investors. The company announced a $103 million Series B in 2025 at a valuation exceeding $1 billion. Spark Capital led the round, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Menlo Ventures.

“The business is just like really, really inflecting,” David Haber, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, told me. Eve has grown to 275 employees, up nearly 40% since June and has plans to double its headcount in the Bay Area by spring 2026.