Catching up on recent legal tech news, there are four notable deals to report.
Athennian Raises $33M
First up is Athennian, the Canadian company that offers a cloud-based entity management platform. It announced this week that it has raised $33 million in a Series B funding round. The round was led by Centana Growth Partners with participation from Arthur Ventures, and Touchdown Ventures.
I first wrote about Athennian in 2020, when it stepped out of its stealth development mode to announce an $8 million CAD Series A investment, on top of a previously unannounced $2 million CAD seed financing round in 2019.
Then last year, it raised an additional $7M CAD in Series A extension funding, with the notable addition of Jack Newton, the cofounder and CEO of law practice management company Clio, as an investor.
The company’s software allows legal departments and professional services firms to automate management of subsidiaries and legal entities. Used primarily by paralegals, the software centralizes director, officer, shareholder, tax and other entity data to create a single source of truth.
Athennian says it is the first true cloud platform for enterprise legal entity management, in a market dominated by two legacy products, Diligent and hCue by CT Corporation (which is owned by Wolters Kluwer).
The company said it will use this new round of funding “to continue taking a proactive approach to scaling its business.”
Nexl Acquires Jade
The Australia-based legal CRM company Nexl has acquired Jade, a unique startup that markets a customer success solution to legal tech companies to help them sell and onboard their products to legal professionals.
Read about Nexl in the LawNext Legal Tech Directory.
“Focused on helping law firms reach their business development goals in an ever competitive legal world, Nexl acquired Jade understanding that modern lawyers and law firms need an on-demand, targeted, and personalized in-app training experience that fits their busy modern and, increasingly hybrid, work environments; Jade’s customer success technology fit that vision (and Nexl’s no-data-entry CRM) perfectly,” Nexl said in announcing the deal March 7.
With the acquisition, Jade’s founder and CEO Gillian Fishman, a former lawyer, joined Nexl as product success manager. Fishman founded Jade in Atlanta in 2020.
Nexl said the acquisition comes at a crucial period in its growth. Over the last three quarters, it says, it has signed-up over 70 law firms, hired and opened offices across six continents, and received major law firm investment.
“With the acquisition of Jade and Gillian joining the team, our Nexl customer base will now see an even more customized, industry-specific on-boarding product experience into the Nexl products, leading to faster time-to-value and reduced training, all built and led by a visionary legal tech product success leader in Gillian Fishman,” said Philipp Thurner, Nexl’s founder and CEO.
Proof Raises $7M
Proof Technology, a company whose platform provides a marketplace for on-demand service of process and e-filing, has raised a $7 million Series A funding round led by Blue Heron Capital and The Legal Tech Fund, with participation by Clio Ventures and existing investors Crossbeam Venture Partners and Forward VC.
The participation of Clio Ventures is notable in that it is its first financing event since Clio announced its launch last October.
Through the Proof app, law firms can post requests to serve subpoenas and other legal papers and available process servers can claim the work, similar to drivers claiming a ride request in Uber. Its network covers all 50 states.
Since launching its marketplace in 2018, Proof says, it has grown to over 3,500 law firms and governmental agencies that use its platform for the delivery and e-filing of documents throughout the U.S. Proof will use this new capital to scale the platform, bring on new users, and cater to existing customers’ unique needs.
Justpoint Raises $6.9M
Justpoint, a company that helps personal injury plaintiffs find the best lawyer by using AI to analyze historical claims, announced its raise of $6.9 million in a seed-extension round, following an initial $1 million seed funding in 2020.
Justpoint offers tools for both potential clients and attorneys. For prospective plaintiffs, Justpoint allows them to select attorneys based on data-driven predicted outcomes.
For attorneys, Justpoint says that it takes on back-office tasks while improving litigation discovery so they can quickly understand a claim’s merit and obtain the best results.
The company says it will use the funding to further grow its offerings, expand the attorney matching platform for victims of sexual assault and human rights violations, and accelerate the development of an AI-based platform to help attorneys better understand claims’ merits.
