Alex Zilberman

Alex Zilberman is co-founder and chief executive of Chamelio, which builds software for corporate legal departments that drafts, reviews, and negotiates contracts and routes legal requests. He is not a lawyer. He was a co-founder and chief operating officer of AnyVision, a facial recognition company, and held leadership roles at the fintech company Pagaya before starting Chamelio in 2024 with Gil Banyas and Gal Lellouche.

Deep learning at AnyVision

AnyVision, started in 2015, built a facial recognition system that ranked among the top three in the world for accuracy at the time, according to The Legal Wire. “We were using what was then the latest and greatest technology, which was called deep learning,” he said. “It was really when GPUs started becoming cool.”

His co-founders come from the same background. Banyas, Chamelio’s chief operating officer, was AnyVision’s general counsel. Lellouche, the chief technology officer, sold his own data extraction company to Sage, the accounting software group, where he became senior director of AI.

Redlining over email

The three began talking to lawyers in 2023, after ChatGPT came out, when few lawyers were using generative AI. “It was practically taboo. It would make more mistakes than it would provide correct answers,” he said. “But the curiosity was there.” They built a prototype at the end of 2023 and signed ten design partners in early 2024. The first product was an AI redlining tool that worked over email: a lawyer sent a contract and got it back marked up. “We didn’t know it at the time, but we’d built our first agent,” he said.

The design partners then asked whether the same tool could do work they had already bought contract lifecycle management (CLM) software to do. “You’ve paid $100,000 or $200,000 for something that promises to do exactly what you’re asking us to do,” he recalls telling them. That is when Chamelio set out to replace CLM software.

Asking why before building

Zilberman says Chamelio was built on customer feedback but led by its own vision. “You shouldn’t really ask a customer, ‘What do you want?’ You should ask, ‘Why do you want it? What are you trying to do?’” He will not rebuild a twenty-step process from an old system just because a customer asks for it. “If you say yes to every feature request, eventually you rebuild the legacy platform you were trying to replace.”