Athennian, a pioneer in the cloud-based legal entity management field, has bagged $8m in a funding round led by Arthur Ventures. The company’s CEO, Adrian Camara, told Artificial Lawyer they now plan a rapid expansion in staff as they serve their global client base.
The new cash adds to a 2019 funding round of $2m, giving the Canada-based company $10m in recent investment. He noted that the new funding was ‘way over-subscribed and we had to expand it several times’ to accommodate demand.
The move is further evidence – if any were needed – that investors are still more than willing to put their cash into highly scaleable legal tech companies that have solid growth prospsects.
Interestingly, Camara told this site that he didn’t meet in-person with their main contact at Arthur Ventures and that it was all done virtually – additional proof that the crisis is not stopping deals happening when there is a good business rationale.
Arthur Ventures General Partner, Patrick Meenan, has also joined Athennian’s board. Other investors included: Round13 Capital, InterGen Capital, ATB Financial, and existing investors included: Thin Air Labs, BlueSky Equities, Viewpoint Capital, Strategic Equities, among others.
Athennian’s software is used by legal departments and professional services firms to automate subsidiary and entity management, or what in the UK might be called company secretarial work.
Camara told this site that it is able to better compete against the main rivals in this space because of its cloud-based offering, and that it can also be used to auto-generate a range of related commercial documents (see Product Walk Through for how it works). They also have a services team to onboard documents and data from clients into their system, although Camara noted that they want to remain a tech company, and not become a services business with an LPO-like focus.
For an AL TV News Analysis of the investment and a Product Walk Through of Athennian, please see the video below. (Press play to watch/listen inside the page. News Analysis runs to 13 mins approx, then there is the product walk through of about 6 minutes in total.)
P.S. The product overview is especially useful for this platform, as it has so many connected features.
The funds will also be used to accelerate product-led growth and invest in scaling Athennian’s cloud infrastructure to support its growing global customer base.
‘The legal entity management market has very high barriers to entry that protected on-premise incumbents operating like monopolies for decades. Athennian brings the first, true enterprise cloud platform with consumer-grade user experiences into the category,’ added Camara.
Patrick Meenan of Arthur Ventures concluded: ‘Businesses are operating in an increasingly volatile, uncertain and complex environment. As a result, in-house legal teams and paralegals have seen their workloads increase dramatically, driving a need for more automation. Athennian’s rapid growth is a testament to their market-leading product. Arthur Ventures is thrilled to lead this financing round.’