Lebanon-Based HAQQ Raises US$3 Million To Scale Its AI-Powered Legal Platform

HAQQ, a Lebanon-based startup building an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered operating system for the legal industry, has raised US$3 million as it advances the development and global deployment of its platform, which has been designed to digitize legal work at scale. 

The round was led by Sowlutions Ventures, a US-based early-stage investment and tech accelerator with operations in Beirut and Dubai, with participation from HITEK Ventures, a venture capital firm based in California; Corona Legal, a Netherlands-based legal services and advisory firm; IM FNDNG, a Lebanon-based early-stage investment platform; Highworth, an advisory firm based in Cyprus; Razor Capital, a Lebanon-based venture capital firm; SYMAX, a Dubai–based strategic investment firm; and Hamady Trust, a family-backed investment vehicle. 

Founded in 2023 by Antoine Kanaan and Maître Abbas Kabalan, HAQQ combines AI-native legal intelligence with practice management infrastructure. Headquartered between the Middle East and the US, it is developing a vertically integrated legal AI operating system that integrates legal intelligence, practice management, payments, and institutional capabilities, and is built for multi-jurisdictional deployment across the MENA, Europe, and North America. 

Speaking with Inc. Arabia, Kanaan, co-founder and CEO of HAQQ, told us that the company operates at the intersection of legal practice, enterprise software, and applied AI. "The company was born out of a simple frustration: existing legal tech digitized fragments of legal work, but none respected how lawyers actually think, reason, and remain accountable," he shared. This observation, he said, was instrumental in designing HAQQ as a platform that delivers a legal AI twin alongside a full-stack practice management system. "Our core mission is to digitize legal, not just legal tasks," Kanaan explained. "HAQQ delivers a 'legal AI twin,' plus a full-stack practice management system. Instead of bolting AI onto documents, we model how legal professionals reason, structure risk, and deliver advice, then operationalize that intelligence across drafting, review, billing, compliance, and matter execution." 

Central to HAQQ's value proposition is Justinian, its AI engine, which the company claims can produce client-ready legal work from a single prompt. The distinction, Kanaan emphasized, lies in the nature of the output itself. "In practice, it means this: when a lawyer or legal team prompts our AI engine Justinian, the output is not a chat response; it is a deliverable," he said. “Justinian produces documents that follow the firm’s drafting style, clause preferences, and risk posture; are structured exactly as a senior lawyer would deliver to a client; include embedded reasoning, fallback clauses, and jurisdiction-specific logic; can be exported immediately as Word or PDF and sent with minimal human review. For firms, this collapses first drafts, internal memos, and review cycles into a single step. For enterprises, it means legal teams stop being bottlenecks and start operating as real-time risk and decision engines.” 

With the new funds, HAQQ aims to strengthen its legal AI and agent architecture, scale enterprise and institutional rollouts, reinforce its security, compliance, and data-residency infrastructure, and grow its engineering, product, and go-to-market teams. For Kanaan, securing this capital hinged on demonstrating concrete milestones rather than future promises. The first was output quality, with Justinian needing to demonstrably outperform both general-purpose large language models and specialized legal software in the depth, structure, and usability of legal work produced. The second was governance, ensuring that AI-generated outputs meet the auditability, controllability, and professional obligations required in legal practice. The third was adoption, with evidence of real lawyers using HAQQ in production environments, not just pilot programs, across multiple jurisdictions. 

With HAQQ aiming for expansion across the MENA, Europe, and North America, Kanaan also highlighted the investors' strategic role in supporting deployments in regulated markets. Beyond funding, these partners unlocked direct access to regulated enterprise buyers and public institutions, infrastructure and deployment expertise for sovereign and on-prem environments, and legal credibility at the bar association, regulator, and judiciary level. "Investors did not fund a promise," Kanaan added. "They funded a working legal infrastructure."

Looking to the future, Kanaan said that he expects legal AI to reshape the practice of law globally. It's worth noting here that HAQQ is a member of the NVIDIA Inception Alliance Program, which supports its development of large-scale AI infrastructure and applied legal intelligence. "Over the past two years, the legal profession has undergone a decisive shift," he explained. "AI is no longer experimental. Legal professionals are already using it in day-to-day work, and that reality is redefining what legal work is actually worth doing." 

Yet, Kanaan was emphatic that the purpose of these systems is not to substitute lawyers, but rather to support them. "We are not building technology to replace lawyers," he said. "We are building systems that amplify them. Accountability, judgment, strategy, and negotiation will always remain in human responsibilities. What changes is everything around them. Legal work becomes faster, more accessible, and more consistent. Routine drafting, reviewing, and compliance stops consuming senior attention. Lawyers spend less time producing documents and more time deciding outcomes. In that future, the firms and institutions that win will not be the ones with the most lawyers, but the ones with the most intelligent legal infrastructure." 

For founders building in this space, Kanaan offered a set of principles grounded in the profession's regulatory realities. "Respect the profession," he said. "Law is governed, not disrupted. Solve accountability before automation. If your product produces generic output, you are already obsolete. Build systems where lawyers can defend, audit, and sign their name under." 

Pictured in the lead image from left to right are HAQQ co-founders Antoine Kanaan and Maître Abbas Kabalan. Image courtesy HAQQ.