Principal Engineer

THIS cofounder Andy Shovel has raised £2 million in seed funding for Keith, an AI-powered law firm focused on conveyancing. The startup, which launches later this year, will deploy 30 to 40 AI agents to handle specific tasks like contract reviews and enquiries. Shovel, who stepped back from day-to-day operations at his vegan food brand THIS in 2024, says the firm will augment rather than replace solicitors. AI agents will complete routine tasks in seconds, allowing conveyancers to focus on complex cases. A typical conveyancer juggling 100 active files could see significant time savings. THIS reported its first operationally profitable month in December, with £21 million in net revenue and 8-9% market share, despite challenges in the vegan food sector. Shovel promises Keith will bring unconventional marketing to legal services.

Keith raises £2M to become the UK's most automated law firm. March 27, 2026 - 2:31 pm Andy Shovel and Pete Sharman, who built THIS into a market-leading plant-based food brand, are pivoting hard. Keith is an AI-native regulated law firm targeting conveyancing first, with a 24/7 AI client agent and a target of reducing transaction times by 70%. Launch is Q3 2026. Andy Shovel's previous company sold plant-based bacon and chicken. His new one will be regulated by the Council for Licensed Conveyancers. The pivot is about as sharp as pivots get, but the underlying logic is recognisable: find a large, fragmented market that has barely changed in decades and rebuild it from the ground up with technology. With THIS, that market was meat alternatives. With Keith, it is conveyancing. Keith has raised £2 million in seed funding, led by Backed VC with participation from Breega and several angel investors. The money will go towards building a fully regulated AI-native law firm that Shovel, co-founder Pete Sharman, and third co-founder Sam Tucker aim to launch in Q3 2026. Its first practice area will be residential property conveyancing, the process of legally transferring property ownership, before expanding into other areas of law. The core technology is a network of specialised AI agents that handle document review, drafting, client communication, and workflow management, all operating within legally defined parameters and with qualified conveyancer oversight at required checkpoints. Keith estimates that up to 80% of traditionally human legal work can be automated in this model. The client-facing layer is a 24/7 AI service agent accessible by phone and WhatsApp, which the company says will be almost indistinguishable from a human operator, able to answer questions, provide real-time updates, and take actions instantly without the typical constraint of business-hours availability. The market context is not hard to make. More than 530,000 UK property transactions fall through each year, frequently because of the slowness and opacity of the conveyancing process itself, a process that has not been meaningfully updated by technology despite the legal market representing approximately £54 billion in annual revenue. Keith is targeting a 70% reduction in transaction times. Shovel's motivation is personal: he told Legal Futures that he tried to buy a house roughly a year ago and had what he described as a catastrophic experience with the existing system, which prompted the idea for Keith. The third co-founder, Sam Tucker, previously founded Common Surface, a hybrid scheduling platform, and now leads product at Keith. The company's non-executive director and strategic advisor is Eddie Goldsmith, former chairman of the UK Conveyancing Association and founder of a prominent conveyancing firm in the 1990s, who brings regulatory and industry expertise to the team. Keith is seeking authorisation from the Council for Licensed Conveyancers rather than the Solicitors Regulation Authority, a deliberate choice the founders say makes the CLC better suited to the kind of technologically disruptive approach they plan to take. Once Keith expands into other practice areas, it expects to seek SRA regulation.