RAVN Co-Founder Wallqvist Joins Leading Point

Peter Wallqvist, the co-founder and former CEO of RAVN, the pioneering legal AI company which in 2017 became part of iManage, has joined Leading Point.

He told Artificial Lawyer: ‘I have recently taken on a new role at Leading Point, which is primarily active in the financial services space, although there is a plan to investigate the legal market for a possible product fit.’

Leading Point has a strong focus on tapping data inside organisations, such as banks, to help them better understand their business, often with a compliance aspect. It’s a startup, having launched in 2016, with less than 20 staff currently listed on LinkedIn.

It’s an exciting prospect to see Wallqvist take on the Chief Product Officer role at a startup, given how he helped to build RAVN up from a small seed of a company.

An outline of Modellr – one of the company’s key products.

One of Leading Point’s key products is called Modellr, which as the company explains: ‘Visualises and organises your business data to help you see the relationships within your business that matter….from impact analysis and risk hot spots to efficiency opportunities or action plans.’

Lots of unstructured data, using tech to gather it up and explore what it means….? Yep, you can see why Wallqvist took this job.

After iManage bought RAVN for an undisclosed sum back in 2017, Wallqvist remained at the company he helped to create seven years earlier. But, in 2019 he left to go solo, taking on new projects as well as a non-exec role at Begbies Traynor, a publicly listed insolvency company.

The company added: ‘Leading Point are thrilled to welcome Peter Wallqvist as their Chief Product Officer and investor. Peter joins Leading Point to help the business scale their products and support the launch of their Regtech and ESG solutions on their Modellr platform.

‘He will be drawing from his rich experience to help Leading Point with its product roadmap, go-to-market strategy, and internationalisation.’

Rajen Madan, Founder & CEO of Leading Point, commented: ‘The market opportunity to deliver revenue and cost efficiencies for regulated sector enterprises with data is huge. Banks spend over $270 bn per annum on their regulatory obligations alone, we know how this can be made more efficient.

‘We are thrilled to have Peter join us at this pivotal moment, having someone with the rich experience of building a valuable SaaS business from scratch will be a real boost. We look forward to working closely together to drive Leading Point forward.’

Wallqvist concluded: ‘I’m excited to be able to apply my knowledge and experience to a company with such a deep understanding of its core market, a track record of collaborative transformation and innovative data solutions.’

So, a new beginning for one of the key figures in the legal AI world who started RAVN – one of the first companies to hit the headlines for its work in the legal sector with NLP technology. And, as he noted above, there is the chance – and the hope – that he will be engaging with the legal market much more again in his new role.

One question is how can Leading Point help the legal sector? Clearly inhouse legal teams are highly focused on compliance, while law firms are often looking to develop services – tech-led or otherwise – that can help them with advising clients on such issues. So, there could potentially be some interesting conversations coming in the next few months.