From left: John Noonan, Isabella Hughes and Oisín Dolphin. Image: EstateMin
The New York-based start-up plans to use the funding to accelerate customer acquisition in the US, grow its go-to-market operation and continue expanding its engineering and product teams.
Irish-founded legal-tech EstateMin has raised €1m in pre-seed funding to scale its US operations.
EstateMin is an AI-powered platform that was built to specifically assist US trust and estate law firms with managing estate planning, estate administration and trust matters. The platform does this by digitising client intake, organising estate information, extracting data from documents and supporting form preparation, according to the company.
The platform uses AI to extract and organise information, identify missing data and support document and form preparation, while integrating with firms’ existing case management systems.
The funding round included participation from NDRC, First Port Syndicate and angel investors Mike Hanrahan, Moira McKenna and Conor Stanley, among other Irish angels. Enterprise Ireland also invested through its High Potential Start-Up programme.
The New York-headquartered start-up, which said its revenue is growing by 20pc month-on-month, plans to use the funding to scale its US operations.
According to the start-up, firms that are currently using the platform are saving “approximately five to seven hours on each estate planning matter and five to 10 hours on estate administrations”.
Founded in Ireland in 2024 by Isabella Hughes, Oisín Dolphin and John Noonan, the idea for EstateMin was formed after Hughes – a former international boxer and legal executive at the time – met Dolphin through an NDRC founder weekend at Dogpatch Labs.
At the time, Dolphin had recently experienced probate – the judicial process whereby a will is ‘proved’ in a court of law – after the death of his father and “was struck by how manual and paper-heavy the process remained”. The process and its tediousness was instantly recognised by Hughes, according to the start-up.
“What Oisín was describing was something I was doing every day,” said Hughes, who is also CEO of EstateMin. “You don’t necessarily question it when it’s simply part of your job.
“Then somebody points out that you’re taking information a client has already provided and typing it all over again, and suddenly you realise how much time is being lost.”
After Noonan, who has more than four years of experience at legal technology company Clio, joined as the third co-founder, the trio founded the start-up under its original name, Simple Probate and set its sights on the US market.
Now headquartered in New York, the start-up plans to use the pre-seed funding to accelerate customer acquisition in the US, grow its go-to-market operation and continue expanding its engineering and product teams.
“EstateMin started with a very simple problem: why are highly trained legal professionals spending so much time retyping information?” Hughes said. “We’ve gone from working on that problem in Dogpatch Labs to building specifically for firms across America.
“Now we want to see how far we can take it.”
The area of legal-tech has seen significant growth in recent years.
According to research from Fortune Business Insights, the global legal-tech market was valued at $33.97bn in 2025 and is expected to grow to $77.93bn by 2034.
At the start of the month, Cork-based legal-tech software firm Bundledocs was acquired by Opus 2 for an undisclosed amount.
In September, legal AI start-up Harvey raised $550m at a $15.5bn valuation, marking an almost $5bn valuation growth for the company, coming less than six months after it announced a $200m raise at an $11bn valuation.
Meanwhile, in August, Norwegian legal-tech start-up Newcode increased its total funding to €17m through a Series A funding round.
Just a few weeks earlier, Irish co-founded legal-tech Wordsmith AI extended its Series B to $84m, led by fresh investment from Toronto-based Intact Private Capital.
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