University of Bristol’s Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship partners with Genie AI to provide free legal contracts for next generation of entrepreneurs

• 25% of its Centre of Innovation and Entrepreneurship graduates go on to start their own company
• Partnership will provide new, existing, and alumni students triple the normal free access to Genie AI’s legal library with all the contract templates and clauses they need to start and scale a business to Series A

Bristol, UK; 6th January, 2023: The multi-award-winning University of Bristol’s Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship has today announced its partnership with Genie AI, the UK’s largest open source legal library, to provide students with free access to legal templates and clauses. The partnership aims to empower the next generation of entrepreneurs with all the legal contracts they need to start and grow a business.

Bristol has a thriving startup ecosystem, with the city having the greatest number of high-growth technology companies in the South West of England. Bristol’s Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship supports future founders to build their business ideas and begin their entrepreneur journey via an Integrated Masters Degree for undergraduates or Masters Degree for postgraduates. Students from varied academic backgrounds bring together their knowledge and passion to identify social and commercial opportunities, with the Centre supporting hundreds of entrepreneurs to date. Notable among them are Welleasy, a healthy snacks business, Peequal, reducing women’s queuing at festivals, Kaedim, technology to render 3d models from 2d images and Vive, pioneering mental wellbeing through visualisation.

As part of the startup journey, founders need a range of legal contracts, from founder and collaboration agreements to patent assignments and term sheets. With Genie AI, users can find, draft, edit and sign legally-sound contracts in minutes. With this partnership, Genie AI’s legal template library will be accessible to all Centre students, cutting an average of £30k in legal costs in the run up to their Series A funding round.

As part of the partnership, Genie AI team members will also provide mentoring as part of the Centre for Innovations’ new Runway project.

Mark Neild, Programme Director for Runway – where student start-ups take flight at The Centre for Innovation, commented: “Our job at Runway is to empower student ventures to have maximum impact. Start-ups never have enough resources and legal support is expensive and often takes a back seat to getting customers. But this can then come back to bite. Genie AI has brought the cost and effort down to zero for my students to get open-source templates, data and insights, which will empower future founders with the confidence they need to sign deals knowing they will not be taken for a ride.”

Rafie Faruq, Genie AI CEO, added: “Our partnership with the Centre for Innovation and Excellence is part of our long-term plan to give back to UK’s most innovative universities, as we span out of UCL’s artificial intelligence lab. This partnership adds to the ongoing collaborations we have with Imperial College and Oxford University. Deep technology takes years to build, and we would like to contribute by significantly reducing the legal cost burden for the next generation of startup entrepreneurs.”

Alex Asher, University of Bristol graduate and co-founder of mifu shared: “We found an abundance of confusing and expensive legal offers out there when starting mifu, an AI powered digital marketing start-up. We are delighted that Runway will provide more legal support via Genie AI. This will greatly simplify the process of sourcing our legal early-stage venture frameworks and help us move forward with more confidence and one less cost!”

Students at the University of Bristol can claim increased access to Genie AI today using the following unique sign-up link: https://app.genieai.co/signup?ref=brist-lchitg41

To hear more about Genie AI’s partnership with the University of Bristol’s Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, or to find out about partnership opportunities, get in touch with Genie AI here: https://www.genieai.co/partnerships

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About Genie AI
Founded in 2017, Genie AI is the UK’s largest open source legal library, and is committed to empowering businesses with customisable and regularly updated legal contracts. It is funded by Connect Ventures (Citymapper) and was awarded one of the UK’s largest ever government startup grants.

With Genie AI, users can find, draft, edit and sign legally-sound contracts in 15 minutes. You shouldn’t have to pay a lawyer to know that your business contracts are legally sound.

Millions of data points teach Genie AI’s proprietary AI what ‘good’ looks like at the clause level and the company uses this data to create high-quality market-standard templates. Standardising contracts reduces time consuming contract negotiations and billable hours by up to 80%.

Media contacts
Leah Jones
CommsCo
ljones@thecommsco.com
+44 7876 117760

About The Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship
Founded in 2016, The Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the University of Bristol is a multi-award winning school combining design, innovation and entrepreneurship. Its multi-disciplinary practitioner-led approach turns out high impact graduates who are capable founders of high growth start-ups and loved by forward-thinking employers.

The University of Bristol is one of the most popular and successful universities in the UK, ranked 61st in the world in the QS World University Rankings 2023.

Media Contacts
Jack Pitts
University of Bristol
jack.pitts@bristol.ac.uk
+44 7977 983547