Fifty-six seconds after I sent a contract to rufus@beagle.ai, I got an email back telling me it contained 27 liability clauses, 259 responsibility clauses and eight termination clauses.

Rufus, by the way, is the artificially intelligent dog at Beagle Inc., a Kitchener-based company that uses artificial intelligence (hence, Rufus) to extract important information from contracts. Rufus interprets the information so users can see what’s important, whether that be using specific search terms or highlighted liability clauses.

“We are the easiest-to-use software-as-a-service out there,” said Cian O’Sullivan, Top Dog and Founder at Beagle. “We’re easier to use than Dropbox.”

Beagle’s success backs up this claim: Beagle is one of the 13 participants in the prestigious Microsoft Ventures Accelerator, a finalist in the Collision Conference’s PITCH competition and a finalist in the South by Southwest Accelerator.

The legal world has also noticed Beagle and O’Sullivan. He is a fellow at CodeX, The Stanford Centre for Legal Informatics, and Beagle is a member of MaRS Discovery District’s LegalX Cluster.

“A lot has been going on, but where it matters the most is getting paying customers,” O’Sullivan said.

O’Sullivan began Beagle two years ago because, as a trained lawyer, he saw the amount of time lawyers and non-lawyers wasted on contracts when they could be doing more meaningful and enjoyable work.

Some 93 per cent of small and medium-sized businesses use in-house workers rather than lawyers to sift through contracts. It takes these workers hours. Some put minimal effort into it or they simply ignore it and hope for the best.

O’Sullivan soon realized that Beagle would help all these workers—no matter how much or little effort they put into the task. Beagle could do the work in one to 20 minutes, depending on the level of scrutiny desired by the user.

Knowledgehook Wins Google Demo Day

Beagle automatically identifies key things in a contract like liabilities, responsibilities, and how you get out of it.  It also lets users search for a word or phrase and it will bring up all the sentences in one place to show you where these words or phrases appear in context.

“A lot of the effort [the workers] put in the contracts is not their expertise,” O’Sullivan said. “We free them up from the bullshit to let them do what they want.”

To ensure this great idea succeeded, O’Sullivan spent four months researching the market to ensure he was making a worthwhile product. He asked people if they would value a system like Beagle and how much they would pay for it.

He also recruited a stellar team of data scientists with expertise in artificial intelligence (natural language processing and machine learning). He even convinced them that Beagle was better than working at their own firm, and they joined him as part of the founding team.

He now has a team of seven, which also includes sales and marketing people. According to Crunchbase, the company has raised $300,000 in seed funding. The team will soon start servicing Beagle’s pilots, including one of the largest auto manufacturers’ insurance company in Germany and a white label solution company in Canada.

Soon, Beagle will offer a Chrome extension that allows users to send any privacy agreements, like terms in conditions that come up on every website, through Rufus.

“People deal with terms and conditions a lot more than they thought they did—and we make it easier to process,” O’Sullivan said.