The Story
Pedro Paulino didn't set out to fix legal tech. He set out to fix the way
talented people find each other. The original Tavrn - a networking app for LA's
creative class, built after his own formative intern summers - was a real company
with real funding. But somewhere between the beta launch and the pitch circuit,
Paulino noticed something more interesting: the most inefficient, document-heavy,
manual-labor-dependent industry in America wasn't entertainment. It was personal
injury law.
The pivot wasn't impulsive. Paulino and co-founder Vitor Vavolizza (CTO, age 21)
spent close to a year shadowing paralegals. Not interviewing them remotely - physically
sitting in law offices, watching how medical records piled up, how demand letters
took days to draft, how client intake swallowed hours. That level of immersion is
rare in tech. It's how you build something that actually fits the workflow instead
of something that just looks like it should.
"Tavrn emerged from our desire to apply AI to industries where manual workflows
still dominate and precision is paramount."
- Pedro Paulino, CEO, Tavrn
The legal product works because it was designed backwards from reality. Medical
chronologies - the dense, multi-hundred-page summaries of a patient's injury
history - are Tavrn's core output. The platform ingests records, links evidence,
extracts damages, and delivers a structured summary in under 24 hours. Demand letters
follow, tailored from the case facts the AI derived. Then retrieval. Then intake.
A paralegal's week, compressed into a morning.
Paulino's angle isn't AI assistance. He's explicit about the distinction: full
automation, high accuracy, source-linked outputs traceable back to the original
documents. "Not AI-assisted drafting," he's said. "Full automation." That is a
different product promise, and it's landing. Law firms report 50-70% reductions in
record review time. Settlement timelines cut in half. One client claimed 6x return
on platform cost within a single quarter.
Left Lane Capital led the $15M Series A in July 2025. A*, Hummingbird Ventures,
and Box Group joined - Hummingbird having backed the original networking app,
now doubling down on the legal pivot. Total funding: $21.6M. Paulino's five-year
call is straightforward: "to become the dominant AI platform that personal injury
attorneys trust to deliver better outcomes faster." That's not a category-building
ambition. That's a monopoly play.
♞
The Chess Foundation
Before startups, there was the board. Paulino played competitive chess, and
he credits the game directly for how he thinks in business: pattern recognition,
anticipating moves several steps out, knowing when to sacrifice a position to
win the endgame. When he decided to shadow law firms for a year before building,
that was a chess player's instinct - gather information before committing.
When he pivoted Tavrn mid-flight from social networking to legal AI, that was
positional awareness. The pieces moved; the player adapted.
Earlier Chapter
Before Tavrn, Paulino ran two speed rounds. At Kalshi, the regulated prediction
markets platform, he saw what happens when finance gets weird and specific -
a product built for sharp bettors on real-world events. At PearPop, the creator
economy play where artists collaborate commercially, he sat in product and watched
the attention economy at its most transactional. Both stints were brief. Both
left fingerprints.
He had dropped out of Harvard before those jobs. Liberal arts. The dropout story
is ordinary in Silicon Valley, but Paulino's isn't really about leaving - it's
about what he was moving toward. The internships that changed how he thought about
networks. The recognition that creative professionals in entertainment were
isolated despite massive followings. The first Tavrn. And then, a better idea.
He hired four account executives in two weeks using Juicebox, doing the recruiting
himself. "I'm a big advocate for founders owning their recruiting process," he's
said. At 52 employees, Tavrn is no longer a four-person beta - but Paulino still
moves like a founder who needs to be in the room. He defines Tavrn's
differentiator not in features but in philosophy: precision beats speed, traceability
beats output volume, and full autonomy beats AI-lite augmentation every time.
