Melbourne-based Deeligence has received AUD $1m in funding, which the startup will use to further build its multi-feature platform to help drive efficiency and support easier collaboration in M&A due diligence projects.
The company has been co-founded by Elena Tsalanidis and Justin Hansky, and both have seen the legal and legal tech worlds up close. Hansky had worked as Customer Success Lead at BRYTER with major UK law firms such as Linklaters, Hogan Lovells, Ashurst and Simmons & Simmons, while Tsalanidis had previously worked at Lexoo on complex multi-jurisdictional projects for enterprise customers.
They had identified due diligence as a particular bottleneck for lawyers and their clients – who were still using Excel sheets to handle M&A deals, as well as coming to see the billable hour as a significant challenge for the sector to overcome.
For example, the company stated: ‘Clients are sick of paying huge hourly rates for this work, so forward-thinking firms are moving to a tech-powered fixed fee business model.’
This and the desire to reshape how due diligence projects are managed has resulted in the platform, which helps lawyers with a combination of workflow tools and automation, ‘from the data room to final report’, as they put it.
So, what does it offer?
And also:
As you can see, it offers a suite of features via a dashboard, showing things such as work progress, changes to deal data room, a centralised to-do list, and live issue reporting. It also shows ‘earned revenue’, supports collaboration among those working on the deal, and gives audit trails, all underpinned with enterprise grade security. Plus, it uses a proprietary system for retrieving information from documents, using ‘best of breed LLMs’ to generate summaries.
The software is already gaining traction amongst top-tier firms in Australia and the UK, including at Lander & Rogers and others, where it is ‘streamlining the tedious due diligence process with an AI-powered platform’ they added.
Hansky said: ‘As pressures mount, the big winners are going to be those that beat the competition with lower fixed fee quotes and deliver using tech, improving margins. While the billable hour will survive for bet-the-farm work, for less differentiated work a huge price-led dislocation is coming.’
While Tsalanidis commented: ‘Diversity in tech and the law is about bringing varied perspectives to the forefront and redefining how legal services are priced and delivered.’
And in fact, the only investor that can be named at present is the Alice Anderson Fund, which supports female-led companies.
Beyond the funding celebration, this does indeed look like a useful platform that brings together several needed capabilities to help improve the due diligence process. Naturally, it’s early days, but it’s in test phase with several large law firms, so it’s definitely on the right path already.
And as to their declared battle against the billable hour, this site can only applaud them!