Divorce as a Service – 6x Faster, 10x Cheaper

01 /The Concept

Aparti promises to make divorce easier – six times faster and ten times cheaper than the current process. And without the emotional friction that typically builds up when soon-to-be-exes have to hash out the details face to face.

An AI guides users through the necessary legal and financial paperwork, walks them through each stage of the process, and reminds them when specific steps or appearances are required. The AI is also available 24/7 to answer any questions about the divorce procedure through an in-app chat.

The startup was founded in California, where the process begins with one party filing a petition that requires detailed information about the couple's legal and financial situation. The AI's first practical job is helping users complete that form without errors.

In a clever – if slightly cheeky – monetization detail, users can fill out the form for free in a chat conversation with the AI, but downloading the completed form as a printable file costs $9.99. That's currently the only revenue stream, though the founders plan to add additional legal tools, integrations with financial services, and a full procedural tracker.

The divorce process itself, under California law, has five stages:

- Filing the petition with the court.

- Serving the paperwork to the other party.

- Negotiating terms – often with mediators and attorneys involved.

- A court hearing, if the parties can't reach agreement on their own.

- The court's final judgment.

Five steps sounds manageable, but the process can drag on for years and become extremely expensive. The average cost of a divorce in California is $17,500; the US average is $15,000. The formal minimum is a $435 court filing fee – but attorney fees can push the total into the hundreds of thousands.

Aparti apparently presented at an Antler accelerator event, where an attendee coined the phrase "divorce as a service" – which captures the concept pretty accurately.

No investment figures for Aparti are publicly available, though Antler typically invests around $150,000 in its portfolio companies, minus roughly $50,000 for program participation.

02 /Why It Matters

However unfortunate, divorce is a large market. About half of all marriages in the US end in divorce.

The scale becomes more vivid in frequency terms: someone in the US files for divorce every 42 seconds – 86 divorces per hour, more than 2,000 per day, nearly 14,500 per week, roughly 747,000 per year.

Dividing shared assets is already a hassle. Add children to the equation and the complexity compounds sharply. About half of children in the US experience a parental divorce – and half of those encounter a second divorce from a parent's subsequent marriage.

This has driven the emergence of services designed to make co-parenting logistics less painful – managing shared expenses, coordinating schedules, and reducing the need for direct confrontation. AppClose ([reviewed here](/review/vy-ne-predstavljaete-skolko-tut-krutitsja-deneg)) raised $7.3 million for exactly that kind of service.

Aparti could develop in that direction too. But based on LinkedIn, their current trajectory points toward B2B: using AI to help law firms manage divorce cases more efficiently.

That pivot starts to resemble what Lawhive ([covered here](/review/dva-bolshih-pljusa-esli-ne-prodavat-ego-otdelno)) has been building – a marketplace for legal services that raised $54.2 million. Lawhive connects people with attorneys across multiple practice areas: tax, debt, property, employment, estate planning, and yes, divorce.

The clever angle on that marketplace: an AI legal assistant helps users articulate their case and match with the right attorney, while on the other side it helps attorneys cut through paperwork and administrative overhead.

Aparti could become a similar marketplace, but specialized purely in divorce proceedings.

03 /Opportunities

The most obvious direction is building divorce simplification services for other jurisdictions – each with its own laws, procedures, forms, and rules around asset division and child support.

The US isn't even the global leader in divorce rates; that distinction belongs to other Western countries with equally high rates. And regardless of geography, the underlying process tends to be time-consuming, expensive, and adversarial everywhere.

The market isn't going away. The number of formal marriages is slowly declining, which reduces the number of formal divorces – but the concept of domestic partnership is gaining legal recognition in more places, and separations from those partnerships are increasingly handled under rules similar to divorce.

Zooming out, the more interesting direction is AI-native startups in legal services broadly. Despite the overall slowdown in venture investment, legal tech has been bucking the trend. In 2024, there were 250 funding deals in the sector totaling $2.5 billion – slightly exceeding the previous record set in 2021, and several times higher than any year before that.