Artificial intelligence is taking up residence in the gilded halls of Wall Street dealmaking.

Kira Systems Inc., a maker of machine learning software designed to make due diligence more efficient, announced this week that it had signed up two of the world's best-known law firms for M&A work: Davis Polk & Wardwell and Latham & Watkins. Kira's CEO, former Weil, Gotshal & Manges associate Noah Waisberg, said other similarly well-known M&A firms are also using his company's technology but have not yet agreed to discuss it publicly.

Other major deal-making firms that have said publicly they use Kira's technology include Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell & Berkowitz; Clifford Chance; DLA Piper; and Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer. The Toronto-based company has publicly announced deals with 14 clients since March 2016. Those are mostly law firms but also include accounting giant Deloitte, which Waisberg said has 5,000 internal users of Kira software.

“What a year or a year-and-a-half ago was kind of a risky decision for DLA Piper has become something that is much more market standard today,” Waisberg told The American Lawyer. “In contract review, this is the way it is now.”

Kira, which started in 2011 and has not yet raised outside capital, didn't take in any meaningful revenue until the summer of 2014, Waisberg said. The company employed four people by the end of that year. Waisberg said it now has nearly 70 employees.

Artificial intelligence tools have gained momentum but are still a rarity inside law firms, with legal consultancy Altman Weil Inc. reporting in July that only 7.5 percent of firms say they use such tools. That number though is much larger for firms with more than 1,000 lawyers, about 55 percent of which say they are beginning to use AI tools, according to Altman Weil.

“Our firm employs technologies delivered by market leaders such as Kira Systems to help us meet client demands for cutting-edge legal analysis and advice in the most efficient manner possible, while also maintaining a consistently high standard of client service and collaboration,” said Latham's chief information officer Kenneth Heaps.

Magic Circle firm Slaughter & May has invested in Luminance Technologies Ltd., a competitor to Kira that announced this week it had raised $10 million in a funding deal that values the London-based company at $50 million. Luminance has announced partnerships with 17 law firms and other clients. None of those publicly announced firms are in the United States, but Luminance has set up a new office in Chicago with the aim of expanding its business stateside.

Kira's Waisberg said his company had earlier found European law firms to be more receptive to AI. But that has changed in recent months as many large U.S. firms, some of which have developed their own technologies, are increasingly signing up for his company's product.

“Talking about AI in law overall, I think there is both a lot less and a lot more going on than people realize,” Waisberg said. “On the one hand, you hear constant talk of AI in law. On the other hand, there aren't that many companies that are actually selling stuff for sustainable amounts. But there are some. I think in our specific area [of M&A due diligence], I think it's kind of mainstream now.”