Augmetec, a new legal tech startup founded and led by Kritin Sundaram, a former Herbert Smith Freehills lawyer, has raised over £2m ($2.52m) in Seed funding for its regulatory investigations platform.
The Seed round was led by UK-based early-stage investors Fuel Ventures, with participation from Swiss fund 14Peaks Capital, and angel investors, including a retired Senior Partner at Kirkland & Ellis, the family office of NetDocuments’ original founding team, and the Head of Fraud at Rajah & Tann Singapore.
All well and good. But, what does it do? The company starts off with the premise that ‘ethics and compliance investigations are slow, expensive, and often inconsistent’ – plus with the current ethical overload that corporates face, there will be more and more matters to deal with.
And so here is Augmetec and its LEIAA platform, which ‘is built by investigators, for investigators’, and empowers organisations ‘to standardise processes and investigative workflows’.
The company explained: ‘LEIAA’s interface provides the necessary tools to manage and conduct entire end-to-end investigations, from inception to reporting, data analysis to witness interviews, and everything in between…..by leveraging these AI and automation-focused tools.’ It also connects to Relativity, iManage, and NetDocuments.
And here’s some of the features they offer:
- ‘Ethics reporting and triage platform,
- Investigation templates and standardisation tools,
- Automated report generation and sharing tool,
- Document fraud detection and data analysis,
- Portfolio management and collaboration,Witness interview technology and tools,
- Dedicated cloud infrastructure to safeguard your data.’
In short, if you work in reg investigations, then this platform has been designed for you, supporting your workflows, the documents you use, and then helping with storage, and other useful add-ons such as witness interview tools. In effect it becomes the place where you work.
The UK-based company will use the cash to hire, build out new features, and grow its client base
Kritin Sundaram, Co-Founder and CEO at Augmetec, said: ‘Augmetec has been built on decades of experience in conducting hundreds of high-profile investigations into alleged improper conduct. Our fantastic team has deep industry expertise to create specific solutions to solve precise, real-world problems. This is the backbone of LEIAA’s offering, which has been directly experienced and loved by customers worldwide.
‘Our vision is to ease the overwhelming burden placed on the shoulders of investigative teams handling numerous, often complex, and multi-faceted investigations, which frequently involve multiple stakeholders across jurisdictions. With the growing number of global investigations, we believe we have built Augmetec at the perfect time to meet this ever-evolving need given the wider international regulatory landscape.’
Fundamentally what this is about is taking first-hand on-the-job experience in a niche legal area, i.e. a collection of specialised workflows, and building a platform of tools to support those workflows.
And, as mentioned in previous articles, while LLMs are driving forward a genAI convergence trend, i.e. where lots of companies all offer a similar range of skills by tapping generalist capabilities, another movement is taking place that is at the other end of the spectrum, i.e. super-specialisation, with founders totally focused on a very narrow field of workflows, often tapping their own personal experiences to build the tools.
Congrats to the Augmetec team on the funding and formal launch.
You can find more information here.
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[ Main pic: Jonathan Jackson – Co-Founder and Chief Scientific Officer, Kritin Sundaram – Co-Founder and CEO, Jennifer Ratz – Chief Operations Officer. ]