Devshi Mehrotra channeled her passion for social justice into a company that, after four years, is profitable and delivering a tool to enable public defenders to hold police accountable.
Q: Tell us about your background and what inspired your passion to advance social justice.
Devshi: I immigrated with my family from India as a young child. Unfortunately, for much of my childhood, I didn't feel as if my culture, customs, and history were respected by my peers. From a very young age, I recognized that people of color in this country were treated differently, and these early experiences inspired me to advocate for greater inclusion for ethnic minorities in America. By the time I graduated from high school and started college, I knew that racial justice was an area that I wanted to devote my time and energy towards. At the same time, my parents strongly encouraged me to study computer science, which was a field I had very little exposure to. I made it a goal to find a way to merge my interest in social justice with the study of technology.
While attending University of Chicago, I was exposed to this country's history of systemic racism, as it manifests through housing, healthcare, public safety, and, especially, policing. By my senior year, I had spent a good amount of time engaging with policing reform efforts in Chicago and decided that I couldn't continue to sit on the sidelines but had to do something. So, I decided to put my bachelor's and master's degrees in computer science to work to address the flaws in the criminal justice system.
Q: Of the many ways in which you could have worked to make our justice system fairer and more equitable – a career in politics or law or working for a nonprofit – why choose a tech startup?
Devshi: I recognized that there was a massive gap between pushing for progressive legislation and actually doing the hard, grueling work of implementing these policy mandates on the ground. Over the past 15 years, there have been many legislative wins in the realm of criminal justice reform, including a greater push to equip police forces with body cameras. But it has become readily apparent that the implementation of body-worn camera policy has left much to be desired.
Public defenders, who are so uniquely positioned to hold police accountable, had been given no resources, no technology, no staff, and very little control over how the body camera footage was shared. Peeking beneath the hood of these policy wins, I realized that there is a big need for technologists, for innovators, for people who will make sure these policies are implemented in a way that's truly effective.
Q: You and your co-founder, Leslie Jones-Dove, met at University of Chicago. How did you come together on this shared mission to found JusticeText?
Devshi: Leslie and I met on our very first day as freshman at the University of Chicago. We were in a pre-orientation program focused on social justice and community leadership. We lived in the same dorm. We were both computer science students. We were partners for our database class. There were many different points at which Leslie's and my paths crossed throughout college.
During our senior year, we both decided to take a class on entrepreneurship, which was specifically tailored towards helping computer science students develop a business plan. Going into the class, I had strong conviction in wanting to build a solution for public defenders. When I shared my passion for criminal justice reform, Leslie and I quickly partnered up. We started down this road knowingthat we had no clue how to actually support public defenders. So, during that quarter, we conducted extensive user research, interviewing any public defender who was willing to get on a phone call with us. We built our initial prototype over the course of several months. And that was the start of JusticeText.
Q: After all your customer discovery, you identified the problem you wanted to solve. Tell us about that problem and how you are solving it.
Devshi: Well over 80% of the cases handled by public defenders today involve some sort of audio or video discovery. Bodycam footage is a powerful tool that can be used to identify potential inconsistencies in a defendant's narrative and the police report.
Unfortunately, public defenders are incredibly overworked, with more cases than they can reasonably handle. Now, they have this added burden of reviewing voluminous hours of footage. As a result, either it's taking them much longer to process cases or they're potentially overlooking critical details buried beneath hours of video.
Our platform eliminates the labor-intensive, manual process of reviewing video discovery. Instead, public defenders can now upload the footage onto our system, which automatically summarizes the interaction, pulls out key moments, and identifies exactly when the client was Mirandized, administered a field sobriety test, and placed under arrest. The lawyer can also ask natural language queries to identify any contradictions between multiple witness statements, and the system delivers an answer that's fully time-stamped and references specific files.
Q: While you are tackling an enormous social problem and following your passion, you are still focused on making money for yourself and your investors. What is your business model?
Devshi: Being hyper-focused on public defenders as our target market, we took the time to understand what those agencies were willing to pay and how to navigate government procurement cycles. From the beginning, we were committed to building a high-quality product that addressed a pressing social issue while building a sustainable, high-growth business. We have a subscription model priced on a monthly or annual basis per attorney or investigator. We've been profitable for the past year, and we continue to grow at an exciting pace. In the next few weeks, we're launching partnerships with the states of Tennessee and Massachusetts.
We have reached a point where the market understands there is a problem that needs to be addressed and that technology can be a critical part of the solution. Public defenders have started advocating to their county and state legislators for more funding to invest in resources like discovery management tools, and that advocacy is paying off. For example, the New York state budget for fiscal year 2024 includes significant funding for discovery-related technology improvements across public defender agencies. As these opportunities are opening up, we are well positioned to capitalize on them.
Q: You recently closed a seed round, with a number of institutional investors and high-profile angel investors. What advice do you have to other founders about how to approach a raise?
Devshi: We have raised approximately $3 million, and $2.2 million of that was in our recent seed round, which took about five months from start to finish. We have a great mix of investors in our corner now – operators, executives in high-growth tech business, and people like Michael Tubbs who have a background in public service. Michael has helped us connect with public defender agencies in California, and another one of our angel investors made the connection that led to the partnership with the state of Tennessee.
Interestingly, the vast majority of our angel investors are Black or South Asian, just like me and Leslie. I think that tells you that when you're betting on a company at such an early stage, investors gravitate towards founders that they see themselves reflected in. This is why it is so important for the venture capital ecosystem to reflect the diversity of the founders they back.
We also secured funding from a number of well-known angel investors, like Reid Hoffman and John Legend. The accelerator communities and fellowships that I was a part of were a key to unlocking those connections. For two years, I applied to every accelerator and incubator fellowship that I could; I went through 500 Startups, Techstars, MIT Solve, and Camelback. When we were ready to start raising, I wrote out a list of everyone within my network and then I reached out asking for introductions. Through this process we met individuals who would express interest in joining our round, and then they would make introductions to institutional investors.
My advice to first-time founders is to join these communities to build your network. Then, when you launch your raise, take every single meeting that you can, have your data room ready, have your deck completely fleshed out, and be ready to make this your number one priority for the next three to four months.
Q: What's next for JusticeText?
Devshi: Our goal is to be in every single public defender office in this country. We are also focused on actively iterating on the product as the state-of-the-art in AI technology continues to advance. For example, the JusticeText feature that identifies contradictions in testimony across different files is not something that could have been easily built even a year ago. In the coming months, we're excited about building out basic object detection capabilities as well. Finally, we hope to leverage the success of our partnerships to advocate more broadly around the need to invest in human-centered criminal justice technology.
Q: Is there anything else you'd like to share with our readers?
Devshi: I am very grateful to have built a team that is truly diverse in every respect – country of origin, race, and gender – and that is committed to our mission. I am incredibly proud of Leslie, who was doing really well as an engineer at Google but decided to leave that position to join me and work full time to build out JusticeText. I am excited to see more and more underrepresented founders step into the startup world because that's how we are going to see a wider variety of problems getting solved.
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