Greg Hong has a pitch that every legal AI investor has heard before: our AI understands litigation better because it lives inside real workflows. The difference is that Hong's company, Steno, actually does own the workflows.
Steno announced a $49 million Series C funding round Thursday, led by Savano Capital Partners, with participation from First Round Capital, The Legal Tech Fund, and other strategic investors, according to a PR Newswire press release. The Los Angeles company has raised $61 million in disclosed prior rounds — $46 million in 2024 and $15 million in 2023 — according to funding databases and prior reporting. Secondary coverage from Artificial Lawyer puts the company's total raised since 2018 at $150 million, a figure that includes both equity and debt financing; Steno has not published a primary-source breakdown of the full aggregate.
The money will fund geographic expansion and a next generation of Transcript Genius, Steno's AI-powered transcript analysis tool launched in 2024. The product does semantic search across depositions, generates summaries, and lets attorneys interrogate those summaries for case facts — a workflow that most competitors sell as a standalone SaaS tool. Steno bundles it with the underlying court reporting service that produces the transcripts in the first place.
"We operate as both a world-class services provider and a tech company," Hong said in the funding announcement. "That hybrid position allows us to build AI capabilities that software-only companies simply cannot replicate."
It's a clean angle on a crowded beat. Harvey, EvenUp, and a hundred other wrappers sell AI to law firms. Steno is selling the infrastructure that those firms then run software through — and then selling the software too. COO Prabhdeep Singh put it plainly: "Many companies in the litigation space force law firms to choose between legacy service providers or pure software solutions. Steno is mastering both."
Savano principal Max Swicegood, joining the board with this round, made the same point: "Their ability to deliver a concierge experience that customers love while building AI tools grounded in data and a genuine, hard-won understanding of litigation workflows is nearly impossible for legacy players and adjacent SaaS companies to replicate."
The AmLaw 200 penetration strategy is where the pitch gets load-tested. Bigger firms mean bigger per-engagement revenue and longer sales cycles. Steno says thousands of firms already use it monthly; tripling investment implies the current usage isn't translating to the revenue multiple this round's valuation presumably requires. The PR Newswire announcement doesn't disclose valuation.
Transcript Genius launched in 2024. The next version — the product this round is explicitly designed to accelerate — hasn't shipped yet. That's worth watching: "game-changer" is a strong word for a tool that hasn't shipped its next chapter.
The press release is the primary source here, and it reads like one. The quotes are on message, the narrative is internally consistent, and the $150 million total raised number gets mentioned without much explanation of where the prior capital went. That's not unusual for a funding announcement, but it means the story Steno is telling is also the story Steno wants told.
What Steno actually is, seven years in: a court reporting company that figured out it could sell software to the same clients it was already billing for depositions. Whether that makes it a tech company or a services company with a software layer is a question that matters to investors more than it does to the AmLaw 200 firms it's courting.
