Steve sits down with Rowan McNamee, co-founder of Mary Technology, the legal AI startup that just closed a $7M funding round led by OIF Ventures to completely disrupt how litigation teams handle evidence.

Rowan’s journey started where all great business ideas do: pitching his mate on the way home from a bucks party. As a former family lawyer, Rowan intimately understood the absolute misery of taking hours of handwritten notes and spending weeks manually digging through thousands of case documents. So, he helped build a solution to eliminate the "fact chaos." Mary Technology is a Fact Management System (FMS) that can ingest thousands of pages of complex, unstructured legal documents and spit out a fully organized, actionable fact record in just 10 to 20 minutes.

We dive into the origin of the company's unique name (yes, it’s named after his actual Aunt Mary), and how they hit 10x ARR growth in 2025 with over 2,000 lawyers globally—including heavyweights like Shine Lawyers and Maurice Blackburn—now using the platform. Rowan also opens up about the "delusional optimism" it takes to get an AI startup off the ground, opening their new San Francisco office, and launching a self-serve model so small-to-mid-sized firms can get the exact same fact management power as the global giants.

Hit play and get the inside scoop on one of Australia’s fastest-growing legal tech startups.

What We Cover:

00:00 - Intro and the elevator pitch for Mary Technology

02:50 - Founding the company and pitching the idea at a bucks party

03:32 - Why they named a highly advanced AI after his Aunt Mary

07:24 - The original product idea and the misery of manual legal work

11:49 - Eliminating "fact chaos" and turning weeks of document review into 20 minutes

13:42 - Raising $7M with OIF Ventures, launching in SF, and scaling the team

21:50 - Navigating the exploded Legal Tech market and standing out

23:56 - Co-founder dynamics and the heavy weight of founder responsibility

30:19 - How the platform handles everything from foreign languages to GIFs

35:00 - The 59% time-saving pitch and their new self-serve model for smaller firms

37:45 - Team offsites, guest speakers, and getting way too competitive at lawn bowls