Eri O’Diah, the founder of justice-focused legaltech startup SIID Technologies, was preparing to onboard 750 public defenders and legal professionals at the end of 2024.
Then, the presidential election happened. And DOGE funding cuts paired with exhausted spending led to federal public defenders going without pay for months in 2025. By the end of the year, O’Diah decided to shut down her three-year-old startup.
She just didn’t see a path forward.
“That’s a part of startup life that folks don’t talk about, is the financial challenges and strain.”
Eri O’Diah, SIID Technologies
“I was working on this largely by myself. After several years of working on this and getting so close, depleting savings,” O’Diah told Technical.ly. “That’s a part of startup life that folks don’t talk about, is the financial challenges and strain.”
SIID Technologies, based in DC and a member of the 2025 RealLIST Startups, was an AI software platform streamlining legal discovery through summarizing large documents, transcribing body cam footage and parsing through evidence.
The goal? Automate repeatable tasks and provide insights to make processes more efficient in an underfunded industry with massive caseloads.
A solo founder, O’Diah said she is in the process of communicating with advisors and filing paperwork to formally close the startup. She’d launched the company as part of an effort to build better systems after George Floyd was murdered by police in her hometown of Minneapolis. Its emphasis was on improving legal processes and access to justice for marginalized groups, who historically are adversely affected by the US legal system and disproportionately make up prison populations.
Needing customers for income, and to prove traction
O’Diah had received five letters of intent from potential federal and state customers going into Trump’s second term.
After almost a year of waiting for answers as federal chaos ensued, agencies communicated bringing on the tech would be paused indefinitely. Over the past year, Department of Justice grant programs focused on reoffense prevention and law enforcement support have been slashed.
SIID Technologies has been completely bootstrapped with O’Diah’s savings, she said. Without customers, she had trouble proving traction to investors to get funding, though she met with more than 100 investors between October 2023 and spring 2025.
She originally planned to pivot her startup, and use the same software to be used in prison systems’ their cameras for safety purposes. But she ultimately decided that’s not what she wanted the tool to be used for.
“While I wanted to drive safety in that space, there was a lot that I learned,” O’Diah said, “the players within the space, I’m not sure I could.” She declined to share more details.
O’Diah isn’t leaving entrepreneurship. She’s been helping startups in legaltech for the past six months through her partnerships role at the Free Law Project. When the next presidential election comes, she may pursue another venture in the field, specifically centered on justice.
Lessons: Seek out a cofounder and make sure accelerators are the right fit
When pitching to potential customers and investors, O’Diah would often cite cases of bias in policing and wrongful conviction rates. Looking back, she would go about those conversations differently, she said — and be “nonpartisan.”
Accelerators are helpful, O’Diah said, but founders should be strategic about what programs they take part in. They should verify with past participants there’s a clear path to bring on customers and enough funding to build a product.
“Make sure that it’s not just two to three hour … sessions virtually that you’re sitting in,” she said. “That you actually get something out of it that moves your startup forward.”
If she did it all again, O’Diah would seek out a technical cofounder. She took part in an accelerator that helped her build a low-code platform, and started working with a developing shop to scale, but wanted more.
“I would definitely want a partner to share the burden with and to lighten the load,” she said. “It takes a team and to move quickly is going to take more than just yourself to move quickly.”
If she starts a business in the space again, O’Diah said she’s going to be more intentional about how she frames her company. Specifically, not to assume people align with the mission she’s pursuing.
“One of the things I’ve really learned is that you can’t be authentic and genuine about how you feel, especially in this space, especially at my intersection,” O’Diah said. “I believe, to a degree, that worked against me.”
