Anuscha Iqbal came to legal technology from finance, not law. A Wharton economics graduate, she spent more than a decade in investment banking and private equity before co-founding Spotii, a buy-now-pay-later platform later sold to Zip Co. With her Spotii co-founder Ziyaad Ahmed, and former Al Tamimi lawyer Karim Shiyab, she set out to build a company with artificial intelligence at its core. The result is Qanooni AI, a UAE AI startup headquartered in Dubai, where Iqbal serves as Co-Founder and CEO.
The problem they chose is familiar to lawyers. Legal work depends on context: the history of a matter, the firm’s precedents, its preferred drafting style and the relevant law. That knowledge is usually scattered across emails, documents and individual memories. Many AI tools treat each request as a blank page, forcing legal professionals to re-explain the background every time, and some produce citations that do not exist.
Qanooni now describes itself as a legal AI operating system for law firms. It works inside the tools lawyers already use, including Microsoft Word, Outlook and Teams, and builds a persistent picture of each matter so that drafting, review and research draw on the same context. Its research layer retrieves material from thousands of live legal sources before responding, and the company says citations are produced only when the underlying source has been found and verified.
The practical value is less time spent re-briefing, searching and checking, and more confidence in the results. Qanooni says more than 150 law firms use the platform.
For an AI founder whose earlier company was built on financial trust, the focus on verifiable answers is consistent. As legal-tech matures, the real question is not whether lawyers will use AI, but whether they can rely on it. Qanooni AI is building its case around that trust.
