Covenant and Emma Legal Team Up to Speed Up Venture Deals

Covenant and Emma Legal announced a partnership to combine AI-powered document review and legal due diligence for venture transactions.

The venture deal market has long struggled with legal bottlenecks that delay closings, inflate costs, and frustrate both founders and investors. This partnership directly targets those delays by connecting two AI-focused legal tools into a single workflow.

The Core Problem

Early-stage venture deals move fast, but legal work often does not. Document review and due diligence are time-consuming, unpredictable, and expensive.

Unlike large M&A transactions that have weeks built into their timelines, venture deals rarely have that runway. Founders and investors want legal certainty, but they also need speed.

How the Partnership Works

Covenant is an AI-native law firm focused on private markets. It built an AI-powered investment review tool that handles document review and contract negotiation.

Emma Legal is an AI-powered workspace built specifically for legal due diligence, which refers to the structured process of reviewing legal documents before a deal closes. It connects directly to data room providers, which are secure digital platforms where companies store transaction documents for investor review.

Once connected, Emma Legal structures and classifies documents, flags legal risks, suggests ways to reduce those risks, and drafts an initial legal due diligence report. Covenant attorneys then use that output to assess risk more efficiently.

What Changes for Deal Teams

The combined workflow addresses the full lifecycle of a venture transaction, from term sheet to closing. According to the companies, it reduces manual review time by more than 50%.

Covenant serves many of the world's leading institutional investors and is backed by Flybridge Capital Partners. Emma Legal is backed by 6 Degrees Capital and Entourage Capital.

Rick van Esch, CEO of Emma Legal, described the shared motivation behind the partnership: "For both the start-up founder and the investor nothing is more frustrating than having a handshake on a deal and a signature date that keeps dragging due to legal work."

Jen Berrent, CEO of Covenant, addressed a common assumption about fast deal execution: "There is a misperception that high velocity in a venture deal can only happen at the expense of accuracy and completeness of the legal analysis. Having a well-engineered process for a specific use case like we co-developed at Covenant with Emma Legal allows for speed without losing any quality."

Industry Position

Covenant is headquartered in New York and led by Jen Berrent, former COO and CLO of WeWork, and Richard Perris, former General Counsel of CVC. The firm describes itself as the first AI-native law firm for private markets.

Emma Legal targets what it describes as a persistent challenge in deal-making: the conflict between speed, accuracy, and depth in legal due diligence. The platform is designed for legal deal teams working on M&A and venture transactions.

Both firms operate in a legal technology segment that is seeing increased investment as law firms and corporate legal teams look to reduce the time and cost of deal execution.

About Covenant

Covenant is an AI-native law firm for private markets headquartered in New York. It is backed by Flybridge Capital Partners and serves institutional investors globally.

About Emma Legal

Emma Legal is an AI-powered legal due diligence workspace backed by 6 Degrees Capital and Entourage Capital. It integrates with data room providers to help legal teams structure, review, and assess transaction documents faster.

Read more about Emma Legal here:

Emma Legal

Emma Legal