D’Adhemar’s Antidote Raises $5m Seed For Billing Compliance

Antidote, an AI-powered automated billing compliance platform – co-founded by former Apperio CEO, Nicholas d’Adhemar, (see AL Interview) – has raised a $5m Seed round led by Lakestar.

Antidote ‘shifts compliance upstream’, checking all time entries in real-time for Outside Counsel Guidelines (OCG) and internal rule compliance, identifying and flagging those that are potential violations as well as ‘providing autocorrected suggestions that are perfectly written and compliant’.

The Seed round follows the company’s earlier $2m pre-Seed fund raise in 2025. Antidote is headquartered in London and already works with firms across the US, UK, and Australia.

Current billing practices and OCG non-compliance lead to 8–12% of billable hours lost to non-compliance write-offs and rejected invoices every year, the company noted. Meanwhile, manual OCG checking and entry updating inside law firms uses up time and energy that lawyers could be spending on real work. Hence the name ‘Antidote’ – as d’Adhemar explained to AL, the new company helps to solve this problem.

The company added that Antidote sits on top of a firm’s existing time-recording and practice management systems. The company has also integrated seamlessly with major practice management and timekeeping systems.

And now some extra context: Apperio – a legal spend analytics company for inhouse teams which d’Adhemar helped to create and lead – was sold to Persuit last year, about 18 months after he had left the company. His departure came about because of a series of market events that were beyond Apperio’s control and that changed its strategy at the time. Now, he has created a new startup, Antidote, which works on the law firm side.  

Interview with Nicholas d’Adhemar, Co-Founder and CEO of Antidote.

First, what lessons have you learned from your journey?

There are almost too many lessons to choose from, but the top 3 would be (i) starting this journey with a cofounder, (ii) making sure you’re solving a genuine pain and (iii) think like a lawyer.

I believe that I will be build a bigger company and faster that provides more value to our customers with a cofounder. Choosing that cofounder is critical, you need to have complimentary skill sets and crucially you need to have a high degree of trust in each other. For me, that is Matt Lyons. We worked together for 7 years at Apperio, where he covered both product and was the CTO.

How did the idea of the new company arrive?

There are infinite things you can build, but comparatively few that you should. I had the idea for Antidote for some time but the first thing I did before raising any capital or writing any code was to conduct multiple discovery meetings with law firms around the business of law. Pretty quickly you’ll see patterns emerge and potentially spot even bigger opportunities but most importantly you’ll know that you’re building the pain killer rather than the vitamin.

The tech is a big part of the story but it’s diluted if it sits on the shelf. In addition to solving a pain, you need to understand lawyers. Not just the work that they do but how they do it and where they do it.

It’s an inspiring name. How did that happen?

It’s all about the ‘Saturday morning problem’ – when doing my early discovery work I spoke to Sean, a partner at a large US firm out of the San Fran office. He said, if you’re going to build one thing, build something that fixes my Saturday morning problem! I’ve since heard it called the Sunday evening problem, the Monday morning problem.

For Sean, he gets up every Saturday morning at 6am, tiptoes down the stairs so as not to wake his kids, sits down at the kitchen table, opens his laptop and begins the process of reviewing his team’s time entries, line by line, to check that they’re acceptable generally and that they comply with each client’s OCGs.  It’s the part of the job he hates the most, it is wasted time and, despite his diligence, 1/3 – 1/4 of the invoices submitted ends up being rejected. 

Thanks, and good luck with the new venture!

—

Last word goes to Navid Meyer, Venture Partner at Lakestar, who said: ‘Antidote is solving a deeply embedded and very expensive problem in the legal industry, and Nicholas brings rare credibility here. He’s lived the problem as both a lawyer and a private equity client and has already built and scaled legaltech startups into category-defining platforms for legal spend management. We’re backing Antidote because it combines a clear product advantage with a founder who has proven he can execute in this market.’

Other investors included: Concept Ventures, The LegalTech Fund (TLTF), and a group of prominent industry angels.

—

You can find more about Antidote here.