Wordsmith AI
Legal operations platform for in-house teams
GRC Lead
In-office work in Edinburgh is expected by default.
About the job
- 8-10+ years in security, IT, or compliance roles, including ownership of a security or compliance function end-to-end at a fast-growing SaaS or technology company.
- Experience building or scaling a security or compliance program from an early stage, ideally as the sole or founding owner of the function.
- Hands-on expertise across SOC 2, the ISO 27000 series, and ideally ISO 42001.
- Working knowledge of identity and access management, endpoint or device security, and cloud or network infrastructure security.
- Practical working knowledge of GDPR and related privacy regulation such as ePrivacy.
- Experience presenting security posture, risk, and roadmap to executives, boards, or investors.
- Experience building or managing a team, or a clear approach to growing one as the function scales.
- Ability to own budget and vendor decisions at a strategic level.
- Ability to operate cross-functionally and communicate with Security, IT, Legal or Privacy, Engineering, and go-to-market teams.
- Own the multi-year IT security and compliance roadmap, including priorities, budget, and tooling decisions with Engineering and company leadership.
- Own security architecture across corporate IT and infrastructure, including identity and access management, endpoint protection, and cloud or network security.
- Lead incident response when security issues arise.
- Own SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, ISO 27017, ISO 27018, and ISO 42001 programs end-to-end, including policies, controls, audit evidence, and audits.
- Run the AI governance program, including AI Impact Assessments and model or AI-vendor risk reviews.
- Own privacy operations, including GDPR and other regulatory obligations, data protection impact assessments, records of processing activities, sub-processor management, and data subject request fulfillment.
- Assess vendors and AI tools for security, privacy, and AI risk and establish contractual safeguards at a program level.
- Build the people, processes, and tooling required for the security and compliance function as it scales.
- Own risk and compliance reporting to leadership and the board as the company scales.
- Act as the senior security voice for enterprise deals, including security questionnaires, data processing agreements, and the Trust Center.
- Partner with Sales, Customer Success, and Legal to support enterprise deals without compromising security or compliance.
- Build lean, automation-first tooling such as Vanta for evidence collection and ongoing compliance monitoring.
- Set strategy, represent security to executives and customers, and drive outcomes with limited oversight.
- Prior experience as a Head of Security, Director of Security or IT, or similar senior leadership role.
- Relevant certifications such as CISSP or ISC2, AIGP, CIPP/E, CIPT, CCSK, or FIP.
- Experience in legal technology, AI, or another highly regulated SaaS environment.
- Experience designing AI risk or impact-assessment processes from scratch.
- Familiarity with Datagrail, MineOS, Whistic, or SafeBase.
About the company
Wordsmith AI provides a legal operations platform for in-house teams that acts as a single front door for all legal requests. It captures requests from email, Slack, Salesforce, Teams, or casual questions, automatically triages and routes them by priority, potential revenue impact, and jurisdiction, and then handles routine work through agents using the team’s playbook. It records ownership, decisions, and rationale in real time so lawyers only step in when judgment is needed. The product suite includes intake, contract review and drafting, research, repositories, and reporting, with integrations to Microsoft Word, Slack, and Microsoft 365. Wordsmith serves hundreds of companies and aims to scale its AI platform, expand into the US, and grow its team and customer base after a recent €60.2 million Series B funding.
Company Size
51-200
Company Stage
Series B
Total Funding
$114M
Headquarters
New York City, New York
Founded
2023
Get referred to Wordsmith AI
See people who can refer or advise you
Simplify's Take
What believers are saying
- August 5 2026 financing extended Series B to $84 million, funding North American expansion.
- Wordsmith says revenue grew 14x year over year, signaling strong demand conversion.
- September 2026 partnerships with iManage and Adyen expand distribution into regulated enterprises.
What critics are saying
- Microsoft, iManage, and ContractPodAI can bundle similar workflows into existing enterprise stacks.
- Rapid hiring across 22 open roles in September 2026 strains product quality and customer delivery.
- If AI misroutes privileged work or leaks data, one major bank could trigger existential churn.
What makes Wordsmith AI unique
- Wordsmith runs legal work end-to-end, not just search or drafting, since 2023.
- Its iManage partnership, announced September 2 2026, embeds agents inside governed legal knowledge.
- Starling and Adyen chose Wordsmith for regulated workflows, proving enterprise-grade auditability.
Help us improve and share your feedback! Did you find this helpful?
Benefits
Company Equity
Hybrid Work Options
Growth & Insights and Company News
6 month growth
↓ -2%1 year growth
↑ 1%2 year growth
↑ 0%Adyen chooses Wordsmith to bring trusted legal AI across the teams that manage risk. Adyen, the financial technology platform of choice for leading businesses, has chosen Wordsmith as its legal AI platform. Adyen is one of the world's largest financial technology companies, and a regulated credit institution holding banking licences across the EU, the UK and the US. Its platform processes over €1.3 trillion in payments annually, giving businesses the data they need to make informed decisions.
Wordsmith appoints Simon McCarthy as VP of Transformation. Legal technology veteran joins Wordsmith to build its enterprise transformation capability as AI reshapes how legal teams operate. Wordsmith AI Ltd is announcing today that Wordsmith AI Ltd has appointed Simon McCarthy as VP of Transformation, bringing one of the legal technology industry's most experienced transformation leaders into its business as Wordsmith AI Ltd expand its work with global enterprises. Simon's experience in legal transformation. Simon joins Wordsmith AI Ltd with 15 years of experience in legal technology and transformation and has worked across more than 150 enterprise Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) and legal transformation programmes spanning financial services, pharmaceuticals, manufacturing, healthcare and other complex industries. He joins Wordsmith AI Ltd having worked across every side of enterprise legal transformation: leading change from within corporate legal teams, building legal technology products, advising organisations as a consultant, and helping technology vendors deliver complex transformation programmes. Wordsmith AI Ltd is welcoming Simon from ContractPodAI, where he most recently led Enterprise Transformation. Previously, he was Director of Contracting Transformation Services at KPMG UK and Director of Product Management at Exari, which was subsequently acquired by Coupa. He also founded CLM Nexus, an independent advisory business focused on CLM strategy and transformation. Why transformation matters now. Wordsmith AI Ltd is making this appointment as generative and agentic AI changes both what legal technology can do and what enterprises need from their technology providers. As AI platforms become increasingly powerful and configurable, Wordsmith AI Ltd see the challenge for legal teams shifting from selecting software features to deciding where and how AI should change the way legal work gets done: which processes to redesign, what to automate, where human judgement should remain, how to manage risk, and how to turn new capabilities into measurable business outcomes. As Simon explains, this changes both the questions legal teams need to ask and the role technology providers must play. "The technology has reached a point where it can be configured to do extraordinary things. The hardest question is no longer simply what the product can do - it's what we should do with it. AI is blurring the traditional boundary between product and transformation. Vendors need to understand the operating model they're helping to create, not just the technology they're deploying. And that means working differently with both customers and partners, bringing together deep product knowledge, transformation expertise and the specialist capabilities needed to make change successful at enterprise scale." Ross McNairn, its co-founder and CEO, said the appointment reflects its ambition to take greater responsibility for the outcomes its technology creates. "We're not asking legal teams to buy another piece of software. We're giving them the ability to fundamentally rethink how legal work happens across their organisation. That makes transformation expertise incredibly important. Simon has spent his career on the customer, consulting, product and vendor sides of this problem. He understands how to connect technology to operating-model change and measurable outcomes and how vendors, customers and partners need to work together to make that change stick." Building its enterprise transformation capability. Simon will lead its enterprise transformation capability, working with its customers and partners from the earliest stages of strategy and solution design through implementation, adoption and value realisation. Through this function, Wordsmith AI Ltd'll help enterprises understand their current maturity, define the target operating model for AI-enabled legal services, identify and prioritise high-value use cases, redesign processes, establish governance and define clear measures of success. Wordsmith AI Ltd is making this appointment after a period of rapid growth. Wordsmith AI Ltd recently announced a $70m Series B and subsequent $14m Series B extension. Wordsmith AI Ltd has grown revenue 14x year-on-year, and more than 500 customers now use its platform, including BT, FT, Sage, Starling, Deliveroo, Canva and Safelite. FEATURE SECTION BOOK A DEMO Ready to transform your legal department? See how the world's leading legal teams are building the future of in-house legal.
iManage and Wordsmith AI partner to connect trusted legal knowledge with agentic workflows. CHICAGO & NEW YORK, September 2nd 2026: In-house legal teams are absorbing more contracts, more questions and more risk every quarter, with headcount that rarely keeps pace. The tools meant to help often add a step rather than remove one. Work still has to be found, opened, drafted, checked and filed back by hand. Today, iManage and Wordsmith AI announced a technology partnership designed to help corporate legal teams get more value from the knowledge and work product they already manage in iManage. Wordsmith AI is joining the iManage Technology Partner Program, connecting its agentic legal workflows with the next-generation iManage platform, the AI-ready knowledge foundation for legal teams. The next-generation iManage platform brings AI into the flow of work while building toward a context fabric - a governed intelligence layer that connects an organization's documents, matters, people and institutional knowledge. Its open architecture is designed to enable approved AI tools, like Wordsmith AI, to access the trusted knowledge they need without requiring organisations to establish a new repository for every AI application. The partnership brings together two complementary capabilities: iManage provides the trusted knowledge foundation for legal work, while Wordsmith applies agentic workflows to tasks including drafting, review and answering routine legal questions. Through the integration, Wordsmith can securely access relevant content through iManage APIs. This enables customers to leverage that knowledge within Wordsmith's agentic workflows, with plans to return resulting work product back to iManage in future releases. "Corporate legal teams are building increasingly diverse AI ecosystems, and they need a governed foundation underneath them," said Ryan Begin, Vice President, Technology Partnerships and Ecosystem Strategy at iManage. "Our open architecture gives customers the flexibility to use great, specialised AI products while getting more value from the knowledge already held in iManage. Wordsmith AI is a strong example of that ecosystem in action - bringing agentic legal workflows together with the governed content and context that corporate legal teams rely on." "In-house legal teams already rely on iManage to hold critical matter content and institutional knowledge," said Ross McNairn, CEO and co-founder of Wordsmith AI. "Connecting Wordsmith to that knowledge gives our agents access to the context they need to support meaningful legal work, while enabling teams to bring resulting work product back into the systems they already depend on. We are not here to help lawyers search a little faster. We are here to take the request, do the work, and hand it back finished." What the integration delivers. The integration is built for in-house legal teams and connects Wordsmith's agents to the next generation iManage platform. It is designed to help corporate legal teams connect agentic workflows with the governed content and context already managed in iManage. * Work, not just retrieval: Wordsmith agents deliver substantive work, drafted, reviewed, redlined, within the workflow. Lawyers get finished-quality output ready for approval and sign-off, not raw material requiring assembly. * Intake to output in one flow: Requests triggered at intake route straight to the right agent, with matter workspaces created and populated automatically, so nothing is set up by hand. * Built on a trusted knowledge foundation: iManage remains the system where customers manage and govern their legal knowledge and work product. The integration enables Wordsmith AI to access relevant iManage content through supported APIs, helping agents work from an organisation's own legal knowledge rather than generic information alone. * Built for the in-house reality: Designed around the volume, mix and pace of corporate legal work, where a small team handles a long tail of contracts and queries. Availability. The iManage integration is offered to shared Wordsmith and iManage customers. Contact your Wordsmith account manager to discuss how iManage can be incorporated into your Wordsmith workflows. Joint go-to-market activity and enablement for in-house legal teams will follow over the course of the year. Media contacts iManage: [email protected] Wordsmith AI: [email protected] FEATURE SECTION BOOK A DEMO Ready to transform your legal department? See how the world's leading legal teams are building the future of in-house legal.
Wordsmith raises $14M in Series B extension funding. August 5, 2026 Wordsmith, an Edinburgh, Scotland, UK-based provider of an AI platform built exclusively for in-house legal teams, raised $14M in Series B extension funding The round was led by Intact Private Capital with participation from FT Ventures, Highland Europe, and Index Ventures. The company intends to use the funds to deepen its presence in North America and strengthen its footprint in the financial services and insurance sectors. Led by CEO Ross McNairn, Wordsmith provides a system of action designed for in-house legal teams to handle legal work internally, control outside counsel spend, and accelerate business support. Their platform codifies a legal team's judgment and carries work from request to resolution by receiving requests across the organization, routing them with context, resolving routine work using AI agents and approved playbooks, bringing in lawyers when judgment is required, and recording every step as work happens. The company has additional offices in London, UK and NYC. Don't just read the news. Own the data. Stop manually tracking deals. Access this round and over 100 others this week - in our structured Master Database (XML) + Weekly Intelligence PDF. [Access FinSMEs Intelligence Hub] 05/08/2026
Wordsmith AI raises $14m extension to their Series B. * August 5, 2026 Edinburgh founded legal AI company Wordsmith AI today announced a $14m extension to their $70m Series B, led by new investment from Intact Private Capital alongside existing investors Highland Europe and Index Ventures. FT Ventures has also become a shareholder in Wordsmith. Founded in 2023 by CEO Ross McNairn, CTO Volodymyr Giginiak and COO Robbie Falkenthal, Wordsmith focuses exclusively on corporate legal departments rather than law firms. Its platform uses AI agents to organise, route and complete legal work across the business, integrating with systems such as email, Slack, Microsoft Teams and Salesforce to automate routine legal tasks and enable legal teams to handle more work internally. The additional investment is said to follow a period of rapid growth for Wordsmith. Revenue has grown 14x year over year and the platform is now used by more than 500 companies, including BT, FT, Sage, Starling, Canva, and Safelite. It is anticipated that the funding will deepen Wordsmith's presence in North America, where demand from enterprise legal teams is accelerating, and strengthens its footprint in the financial services and insurance sectors. Justin Smith-Lorenzetti, managing director at Intact Private Capital, said: "In-house legal teams at financial services and insurance companies need legal infrastructure that can operate at enterprise scale while maintaining the control and auditability required in highly regulated environments. Wordsmith is built precisely for that challenge, with a deep understanding of how these organizations work and the infrastructure to match."