Noella Sudbury spent years as a public defender watching clients walk free from court, only to remain trapped by something far harder to shake: the record itself. A shoplifting conviction at nineteen. A DUI from a decade ago. Mistakes that employers and landlords never forget, even when the law says they should.
So Sudbury built a company to make forgetting easier—or at least, to automate the bureaucratic machinery that allows it.
Rasa Legal, the Utah-based legal tech platform she founded, announced a $5 million late seed round on March 10, led by Rethink Education. Social Finance, Halogen Ventures, the Richard King Mellon Foundation, and a handful of other investors joined the round. The fresh capital will fund what Sudbury hopes is an aggressive nationwide expansion: from three states today to roughly twenty by 2030, if all goes according to plan.
That's ambitious, perhaps more than the trajectory of most legal tech startups would suggest. But Rasa isn't tackling corporate contracts or patent litigation. It's going after a problem with staggering scale and surprisingly little competition: helping people clear criminal records that are technically eligible for expungement or sealing, but that almost never get cleared under traditional systems.
Since launching its web platform in September 2022, Rasa has cleared over 5,000 criminal records. More than 26,000 people have used the company's tools to check whether they qualify—a three-minute screening process the company offers for free. The platform operates today in Utah, Arizona, and Pennsylvania, where it launched in December, focusing initially on Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.
The Invisible Penalty
The statistics around criminal records have been cited so often they risk becoming background noise. But the numbers remain jarring. One in three Americans carries some form of criminal record—a universe of roughly 100 million people navigating an economy where nine in ten employers and four in five landlords run background checks.
Research shows that job applicants without a felony conviction are about 63 percent more likely to get a callback than identical candidates with a record. After expungement, wages jump by more than 22 percent within a year, according to a frequently referenced Michigan study.
Yet only about 6.5 percent of eligible individuals actually get their records cleared within five years under petition-based systems, data from the Clean Slate Initiative suggests. Traditional law firms often charge thousands of dollars per case—costs that are, by definition, prohibitive for people whose earning power has been kneecapped by the very records they're trying to erase.
Rasa's pitch is straightforward automation. The platform uses mobile-friendly software to parse court and corrections data, instantly flagging what's eligible for sealing or expungement under state law. Then the company's lawyers handle the filings, manage prosecutor responses, chase down court orders. In Utah, Rasa also processes offense reductions—a separate legal pathway under state statute 402. Flat-rate pricing. No surprises.
The company operates under Utah's regulatory sandbox program, a framework that allows nonlawyer providers to deliver tech-enabled legal advice as long as lawyers are involved in the process. It's a model that skirts traditional unauthorized practice-of-law concerns, though not without controversy in some legal circles.
B2C Meets B2B
Rasa has hedged its growth strategy, pursuing both direct-to-consumer channels and institutional partnerships. In February, Pennsylvania-based Flagger Force—a traffic control and safety company—announced it would offer confidential record-clearance services to eligible employees through Rasa, starting in Pennsylvania and expanding as the startup's footprint grows.
The company also integrated with Utah's Department of Workforce Services last December, embedding its software into workforce accounts so job seekers can access eligibility screenings while hunting for work.
Amy Nelson, a partner at Rethink Education, will join Rasa's board as part of the investment. In a statement, she framed the bet in human capital terms: millions of people sidelined from the labor market, not because of current behavior, but because of past mistakes the legal system has already deemed resolved.
Before this round, Rasa raised a $1.1 million pre-seed extension in August 2023, which brought in Acumen America, Sorenson Impact Foundation, Dream.org, and GoodLight Capital. At that point, the company reported 8,000 screenings and 2,000 cases in process—figures that have grown considerably since.
A Shifting Legal Landscape
The regulatory winds, at least, seem to be shifting in Rasa's favor. Thirteen states plus Washington, D.C., have passed Clean Slate or automatic record-sealing laws as of early 2026, according to the Clean Slate Initiative. Colorado's law took full effect in July 2025. Illinois passed its version in October of the same year.
Automatic sealing laws represent a different model than petition-based systems—records disappear without requiring individuals to file paperwork or hire attorneys. But even in states with automatic provisions, gaps remain. Certain offenses don't qualify. Timing requirements vary. And many people don't know what applies to them.
That's where Rasa sees an opening. Not just in states where petitions are still required, but in helping people navigate the patchwork of what's automatic, what's not, and what falls somewhere in between.
Whether the company can scale to twenty states by the end of the decade is an open question. Legal services are notoriously resistant to disruption—state bars are protective, regulations are inconsistent, and technology adoption among courts is glacial. Sudbury's background running Utah's Clean Slate campaign gives her unusual fluency in the policy and advocacy side of the equation, but translating that into a venture-backed technology company is a different challenge entirely.
Still, the market is undeniably there. And for now, at least, the funding is too.
