Software company JusticeText today announced the closing of a $2.2 million seed round with participation from Bloomberg Beta, True Ventures, Reid Hoffman, John Legend and Michael Tubbs.
Launched in 2019 by Devshi Mehrotra and Leslie Jones-Dove, the company stores, catalogs, analyzes and shares video evidence with the goal of increasing transparency around criminal issues such as police interactions and improving overall justice outcomes for low-income criminal defendants. The product is intended for public defenders for use in trials.
“As a technologist, I haven’t been able to influence policy or legislation, especially at my young age,” Mehrotra told TechCrunch. But this was very much in my wheelhouse when it came to helping to improve the efficiency of the work that public defenders do.
Mehrotra and Jones-Dove met seven years ago as freshmen at the University of Chicago. Both studied computer science and were passionate about campus police reform. Video of Laquan McDonald’s murder goes viral. At the time, there was a recent clip of a black man dying at the hands of the police.
Mehrotra and Jones-Dove grew up watching the tragic death of Trayvon Martin on cable television. Days before the first semester of the first semester in Ferguson, Missouri, following the killing of Michael Brown. More than 1,500 black men have been killed by police since 2015, according to the Washington Post.
“I’ve spent a lot of undergrad thinking about the role of technology in our criminal justice system and how the technology that’s being developed is designed to make it easier to arrest and incarcerate,” Mehrotra said. We want to do something to help our community.
JusticeText makes criminal evidence information searchable by keywords, weapons, drugs, and crimes, so attorneys can easily create videos for use at trial or at trial. The firm currently works with 50 public defender offices and has approximately 60 private criminal attorney clients.
The two began their fundraising journey in February, which Mehrotra said took around five months to complete. She described her experience as “robust” and said other founders and angel investors rely on investors they find at accelerators to help facilitate introductions to big-name investors. The company will use the funding to continue building Advanced Natural Language Integration and expand its sales, marketing and communications teams.
“It’s rare to see founders both doing something so important to the world, like screwing up our legal system, and making their customers pay for it,” Roy Bhatt, head of Bloomberg Beta, told TechCrunch. “Winning companies need to do right and do well for the world. Devshi and Leslie are doing both.
The singer and angel investor legend echoed similar sentiments.
“America’s criminal justice system disproportionately harms communities of color, and we must empower our public defenders with formidable tools to protect and prevent that harm,” he said. “I’m excited to see how the JusticeText platform can contribute to a world where everyone gets the representation they deserve.”
Mehrotra’s reception to JustText has been positive so far. Public advocates have taken an interest in the product, especially in light of court cases that have worsened during the pandemic. In the past, they said that the text of justice will simplify the execution of their cases, lawyers have reached to further expand their bandwidth.
That’s important because many low-income defendants are held in pretrial detention because they don’t have a public defender. Jail Policy Initiative More than 400,000 people are incarcerated while awaiting trial, many simply unable to afford cash bail. Overall, Mehrotra says the company’s goal is to move the needle — even if it’s just a little.
“Hopefully, we can be an intervention that gets more and more people out of the justice system and leads them into rehabilitation programs,” she said. “We’re proud to build technology that can deliver critical insights from video evidence in minutes — all with the ultimate goal of increasing transparency and enabling fair outcomes in our justice system.”
