He wanted to watch real estate from space. A customer told him the idea was bad. So he built the software that now runs the legal side of 200,000 property deals a year.
Real estate is the largest asset class on the planet. The legal work underneath it - the deeds, the titles, the historic documents nobody wants to open - is still done mostly by hand. Will Pearce runs the company betting that this ends.
Orbital, the company he co-founded with Ed Boulle in 2018, builds AI for property lawyers. Its flagship, Orbital Copilot, is designed to reason like a real estate legal professional rather than replace one outright. The platform reviews documents, drafts, maps land and pulls together the diligence that stands between a handshake and a signature.
In January 2026 the company raised a $60 million Series B led by Brighton Park Capital, with RELX - the owner of LexisNexis - joining through its venture arm. Pearce packed up and moved to New York to run the American push. The team is around 120 people and set to double.
The interesting part is not the funding. It is that the whole thing started with a rejection.
"Real estate is the world's largest asset class. Yet the legal work that underpins it remains slow, fragmented and largely manual."
Pearce started his career in the UK space industry, working with a government agency whose job was turning space technology into businesses. He launched his first venture at 23. The plan he and Ed Boulle cooked up was pure space-tech ambition: point AI at satellite imagery and monitor real estate from orbit.
They took it to property investment funds. The verdict came back in three words - "this is a bad idea." But the same people who rejected the satellites let slip what they actually needed: help with the slow, manual legal grind of property transactions.
Most founders hear "bad idea" and leave the room. Pearce heard a market. The company pivoted from watching buildings to reading their paperwork, and kept the space-flavored name as a reminder of where the ambition came from.
Being outsiders turned out to be the edge. Not being real estate people, not being lawyers, meant they could question a process that had gone unchanged for 150 years and ask the obvious question nobody inside the industry was asking: why is it still like this?
From monitoring property from space to automating the legal work behind every deal. Same founders. Same ambition. Completely different product.
Pearce splits his weeks between hiring, talking to customers and partners, and product strategy. No secret fourth thing.
Ask Pearce how he spends his time and the answer is unglamorous by design. Roughly a third goes to hiring. A third goes to the outside world - customers, partners, the people who decide whether Orbital is worth trusting. The last third goes to product strategy, deciding what the company builds next and, just as important, what it does not.
There is no fourth bucket. No growth hack, no clever shortcut. The discipline is in the refusal to add a fourth thing. For a company scaling across two continents while raising tens of millions, that kind of focus is the rarest resource there is.
The hiring philosophy has an edge to it too. Pearce prioritizes ability over experience, betting on people who can question the way property law has always worked rather than defend it. It is the same instinct that made the original pivot possible - a preference for the sharp outsider over the credentialed insider.
Hiring. Customers & partners. Product. In roughly equal thirds - and nothing else fighting for the calendar.
Bet on people who challenge the process, not the ones who have spent a career inside it.
Works with a UK government agency focused on commercializing space technology. Launches his first venture at 23.
Co-founds the company in London with Ed Boulle after pivoting from satellite monitoring to real estate legal automation.
Raises a £7.5m round led by Parker89 as revenues double and the team grows past 45 people.
Opens a US office and relocates to lead expansion across the Atlantic.
Brighton Park Capital leads, with RELX / LexisNexis and The LegalTech Fund backing. Total funding reaches roughly $75m.
Orbital does not sell a single tool so much as a way through the transaction. The pieces stack on top of each other, from raw title data to a finished report.
The flagship. An AI assistant built to reason like a real estate legal professional - drafting, reviewing complex documents and handling the back-and-forth of a deal.
The original name, now a product: property and title data analysis, mapping and spatial visualization layered onto the legal work.
UK title reviews and automated report generation, aimed at the volume end of property transactions where speed matters most.
The platform combines AI tuned for real estate law with spatial data - deeds, records, historic documents and maps - so a transaction that used to crawl through inboxes can move at software speed. That is the pitch Pearce takes into every room: the legal work is the bottleneck, and the bottleneck is optional.
The $60m Series B in January 2026 was led by Brighton Park Capital, a New York growth fund. The detail that made the legal-tech world sit up was the arrival of RELX - the parent of LexisNexis - through its venture arm, alongside The LegalTech Fund. When the company that owns the industry's reference library invests in your automation layer, it says something about where the category is heading.
Earlier rounds pulled in a roster that reads like a map of the sector's smart money: Parker89 led the Series A, with LocalGlobe, Outward VC, Seedcamp, JLL Spark and property giant Grosvenor all on the cap table. Total funding now sits at roughly $75m.
Pearce is spending it deliberately - not on noise, but on people, product and the American beachhead.
After the raise, Pearce relocated to New York to lead the US expansion himself rather than manage it from London. The plan is to open additional US hubs beyond the first New York office and roughly double a team already around 120 strong.
It is a founder putting himself where the risk is. The UK gave Orbital its proof; the US is where the market - and the world's largest pool of real estate deals - actually sits.
Selling AI into law is hard. Selling it into the firms that write the rulebook is harder. These are the names that trust Orbital with their property document review.
Pearce announcing an earlier funding milestone and the journey from satellite tech to pioneering AI in real estate legal work.
Pearce's answer to "can you trust the AI?" is to make outputs reliable enough for real transactions, underwritten rather than hand-waved.
Not coming from real estate or law let the founders challenge a workflow unchanged for a century and a half.
The company's entire direction came from listening past a "no" to hear what the customer actually needed.
"We're not from this world - and that let us challenge processes unchanged for 150 years."
On the legal work behind the world's largest asset class.
On why being an outsider let Orbital rethink 150-year-old process.
On the standard Orbital holds its AI to.
Strip away the funding rounds and the logos and Orbital is a simple wager. Property is the biggest asset class there is, the legal work under it is a swamp, and someone who is not too precious about how things have always been done can drain it.
Will Pearce is not a lawyer. He is not a real estate lifer. He came in from the space industry, got told his first idea was bad, and had the discipline to hear the better idea buried inside the rejection. Eight years, two continents and $75m later, the firms that write the industry's rules run their diligence through his software.
The satellites are gone. The ambition that named the company is not. And the next chapter is being written from a desk in New York, one automated transaction at a time.
Will Pearce is the co-founder and CEO of Orbital (formerly Orbital Witness), a real estate legal AI platform that powers roughly 200,000 property transactions a year for the world's leading law firms and property companies. He and co-founder Ed Boulle started out in the space industry with a plan to monitor real estate from orbit, were told the idea was bad, and pivoted into automating the slow, manual legal work that underpins property deals. In January 2026 the company raised a $60m Series B led by Brighton Park Capital, and Pearce relocated to New York to lead its US expansion.
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