Legal Spend Startup Brightflag Bags $8.5m Series A Funding

Legal spend management system, Brightflag, has raised $8.5m in a Series A funding round, led by Sands Capital Ventures with the participation from existing investors Frontline Ventures and Tribal Ventures. This round brings the total amount raised by Brightflag to $11 million.

All very nice. But what does it do?

To quote their own words, this is what they do: ‘Brightflag uses new language analysis technologies to read and categorize every narrative time entry from your outside counsel. This gives Brightflag customers [an] automated invoice review platform …, [capable of] doing all the heavy lifting for invoice reviewers and driving substantial savings.’

‘And once all your lines are categorised, you now have [a] legal pricing tool available, leveraging all your historical categorised data for procurement, negotiations, and alternative fee arrangement analysis.’

In short, Brightflag is one of a growing number of legal cost/time/spend management systems in the market, with many of them tapping NLP and Machine Learning to give clients – often corporate legal teams – a far greater understanding of their legal spend and what external lawyers are really doing.

This helps keep spending on track and also makes setting fixed fees a lot easier – as they now have detailed data on which to base their assessments of what things should cost.

The company, which has clients such as Uber and Telstra, said it had tripled in size year on year since product launch in 2015.

‘The investment round will enable Brightflag to … recruit new team members across our offices in Dublin, New York, and Sydney. The roles will be created throughout the organisation’s engineering, data science, and growth teams,’ the company said.

Ian Nolan, CEO of Brightflag said: ‘We’re excited to enter this new phase of growth in Brightflag. Our team has built an amazing technology that is driving real change in the legal industry, and we’re excited to play a part in this sea-change.  We’re delighted to welcome onboard our new investor Sands Capital Ventures to support us through this journey.’

(Picture – co-founders Alex Kelly and Ian Nolan.)