The Round
Manifest OS, the company building AI-native infrastructure for a new generation of law firms it calls "NewMods," raised $60 million in a Series A at a $750 million valuation, with participation from Menlo Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, and First Round Capital. The company incubated its first firm — Manifest Law — under the Arizona Alternative Business Structure (ABS) program, which allows non-lawyer investment in law firms. The Arizona ABS experiment, now four years old, has become the primary testing ground for the NewMod hypothesis.
The timing reflects accelerating investor conviction that the legal industry's next wave of disruption will come from NewMods — firms built from scratch on AI infrastructure — rather than from established firms retrofitting AI onto existing operations. The Manifest OS raise is the largest disclosed NewMod investment to date.
What Manifest OS Actually Builds
The company operates what CEO Dan Mishin describes as three integrated layers: a brand (Manifest Law) that signals transparent pricing and outcomes-based work; a software platform handling intake, drafting, billing, and client communication; and a centralized back office of AI-proficient paralegals and admins that provides the operational scale of a large firm without the overhead structure.
The model is explicitly designed against the billable hour. Former Salesforce, Groupon, and Slack GC David Schellhase, a Manifest investor, said: "I've spent my career as a general counsel and seen firsthand how the billable hour model creates friction on both sides of the table. Companies want fee transparency, predictability, and speed. Manifest OS aligns those interests in a way the traditional system simply doesn't."
The question the funding answers: is this model replicable across practice areas? Manifest Law started in business immigration. The raise signals investors believe the answer is yes.
The NewMod Wave
NewMods — AI-native law firms — have moved from an interesting experiment to a genuine investment category in 2026. At least twelve NewMod-adjacent raises have been announced since January, collectively representing more than $200 million in capital. The common thesis: the unit economics of legal service delivery are about to be restructured, and firms built on the new economics will outcompete firms built on the old ones.
Whether NewMods will penetrate complex, high-stakes practice areas — where human judgment and relationship equity remain hard to replace — is the open question. For now, they are winning on consumer and small-business matters where price transparency and speed are the primary decision criteria.