An industry-leading Tauranga start up has crowned off a major earnings surge with a capital injection of $17 million from a New York venture capital and equity firm.
LawVu, a company developing and selling software for in-house legal teams has welcomed the $17 million, which includes support from Australian venture capital firm AirTree Ventures.
Sam Kidd, LawVu co-founder, welcomed the significant capital injection at a time when corporates were intensifying efforts to improve their counsels’ technology.
“In house legal teams perform a critical function inside every corporation. However, you will often find the only ‘tech’ they have is email and word documents.
“Legal teams are becoming a bottleneck, as the rest of the business leverages off technology and speeds up.”
The firm was established by Kidd and Tim Boyne in 2015, stemming in part from Boyne’s employment with a leading city firm, and his frustration at the delays in compiling monthly reports for big company clients.
Combined talents
The men combined talents, with Boyne’s experience in law IT systems and Kidd’s ability project managing software development pushing the company along quickly.
LawVu combines a range of software tools based around document creation, record keeping and time management under one umbrella, replacing the Post-it notes Kidd says are often employed by teams to keep track of jobs.
LawVu is considered the leader in this space amongst many of the most tech savvy in-house legal teams in the world. – James Cameron
The platform allows teams to manage all their matters, contracts, documents, e-billing, outsourced work, and reporting from one cloud-based, secure, and connected platform, with a connected third-party tools critical to a high-performing in-house function.
The initial big break for the company came with Telstra adopting the software suite, and other large Australian corporates and public entities quickly following. Large clients in New Zealand include Zespri, Fonterra, Sky, and Harcourts. The company’s technology is now in 30 countries.
James Cameron, a partner in AirTree Ventures, said there was a big push globally to get in-house legal teams up to speed with technology, and improve their efficiency in the process.
“LawVu is considered the leader in this space amongst many of the most tech savvy in-house legal teams in the world. It is also fantastic to be investing alongside world-class global investors like Insight to help continue to grow the business in its biggest markets in the US and Europe.”
He said there was significant demand from global investors to invest in fast-growing Australian and New Zealand tech businesses.
The injection comes after the company earlier secured $2.5 million of funding through convertible notes, supported by NZ Growth Capital Partners.
Funding has also come from local investor Craig Wearne who liked the idea from the get-go.
The latest investment enables the company to continue to optimise in-house legal team performance and increase their engagement with the broader business.
