Manifest OS has sealed a $60 million Series A funding round, valuing it at $750 million.

Investors in the round include Menlo Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, First Round Capital, and Quiet Capital.

Manifest OS was founded by Dan Mishin, an entrepreneur who said he spent tens of thousands of dollars on the legal paperwork to become a US citizen. He said his company’s mission is to “end the billable hour” to make legal services accessible to all. “Attorneys are managing AI agents instead of doing the work themselves,” he said. “Lawyers are focused on doing one thing and one thing only, which is the practice of law. We handle everything else.”

Transcript

Dan Mishin: Look, I've been a buyer of legal services as an entrepreneur, building companies in the US and as an immigrant going through an O-1 visa, then a green card, and then becoming a citizen. And every time it was the same thing — you commit to a certain billable hourly rate, and you only know how much you spend about a month after the service was completed.

That level of uncertainty is the standard in the industry. And then you're chasing your lawyer to get updates on your case over email, and you're left in the dark. I got very curious about why that's the status quo and why we've accepted that 90% of all legal services is billable hourly rate.

The insight we had is that one of the main reasons is that two thirds of lawyers who work at small law firms — which is the majority of the market — spend the vast majority of their time doing non-legal work: administrative work, business development, getting clients, running the business. And we realized that we can separate the two.

So what Manifest OS does is we help individual exceptional attorneys that have many years of experience launch their new practice from scratch and grow it into a market leader by becoming fully AI-native — the whole law firm is AI native from day one. We provide them with a full AI-native software suite, so attorneys are managing AI agents instead of doing the work themselves.

Bloomberg: Like Microsoft Office for lawyers — a bunch of tools?

Dan Mishin: It's tools. It's a centralized back office with centralized paralegal, centralized support, centralized accounting, and one unified brand. You have to have a full software layer where lawyers practice and prepare cases, as well as that back office and a centralized brand.

Bloomberg: You're now hiring lawyers to essentially put lawyers out of business.

Dan Mishin: We are partnering with lawyers and we help them launch their practice from scratch.

Bloomberg: But if your mission is to end the billable hour, there won't be as much demand for lawyers, right?

Dan Mishin: 80% of Americans today don't have access to legal representation.

Bloomberg: So you're saying it's more of a democratization — and a supply issue?

Dan Mishin: Increasing the supply. This is a clear use case where 80% of people who can't afford to hire a lawyer will be able to do so, because each lawyer can now process more cases by streamlining the inefficiencies in the business itself. Each lawyer can focus on one thing only: the practice of law and helping their client.

Bloomberg: So all the back office and administrative work is taken care of — it's not about figuring out the specifics of a case, like in immigration law. It's all the other stuff.

Dan Mishin: Correct. It's the two thirds of the time lawyers spend on non-legal work. Lawyers focus on one thing only — the practice of law — and we handle everything else. That level of partnership unlocks so much productivity that each lawyer can handle more cases, help more people, and lawyers are happier because they're doing more meaningful work.

Bloomberg: What about complex business litigation or complex prosecution and defense — would this work for those attorneys too?

Dan Mishin: AI is more applicable to some practice areas and less applicable to others. Something high-stakes and very complex, like multi-hundred-million-dollar litigation — probably not as much. But everyday legal matters that everyday Americans use — family law, immigration law, employment law — there is a lot of leverage that comes from using technology and unlocking lawyers' productivity. And to be clear, you're not eliminating lawyers' judgment. You're providing lawyers with all the support infrastructure so they can practice law better than they could before Manifest OS.

Bloomberg: Does this impact paralegals or pre-law graduates?

Dan Mishin: We always keep a human in the loop. Attorneys have to have the final say over any document produced by AI. We've all seen court records where AI hallucinates and an attorney files a case and the judge slams them. Even if it's 99% accurate, that 1% is an unacceptable level of risk.

Bloomberg: So have you actually put this to work? Give us some real use cases — especially thinking about the return on investment.

Dan Mishin: We incubated the first Manifest OS-powered law firm 18 months ago, starting with legal immigration — visas and green cards for people pursuing a legal journey inside America. In the first 18 months, we have 100 Manifest OS-powered lawyers operating in this AI-native environment. They've serviced over 3,000 clients and have a 15% higher approval rate than the national average — and three times faster response time.

Bloomberg: Higher approval in terms of whatever the immigrant is applying for?

Dan Mishin: Correct. And three times faster response time, because one of the biggest complaints about lawyers is you email them and never hear back.

Bloomberg: I always get the bill on time, though.

Dan Mishin: (laughs)

Bloomberg: So, talking about the fundraising environment — Kleiner Perkins, Menlo Ventures, First Round Capital, Quiet Capital — some big Sandhill Road names. What was it like to raise money right now for an AI startup?

Dan Mishin: There's a lot of excitement about two types of businesses right now: the foundational models themselves, and AI-native services businesses — a completely new category that never existed before. We fall in that AI-native services category. People are excited about solving this specific problem and they see a huge market. It's a $1 trillion market globally for legal services, with a huge level of inefficiency. The opportunity is real.