A LegalTech platform from London, SeedLegals has reached a significant funding milestone, as it has closed over £1 billion in investments for UK companies, including Qured, Oddbox and dating app Thursday.
On reaching this milestone, co-founder Anthony Rose said: “When we started SeedLegals our goal was to help companies do a funding round faster and more reliably. But now we joke that our goal is to help companies not do a funding round. Instead of the existing 12-18 month go big or go bust fundraising cycle that founders dreaded, we’ve pioneered Agile Fundraising which has single-handedly transformed the way UK startups raise investment. SeedLegals customers now raise as much before and after a funding round as in a funding round, allowing them to grow faster, give away less equity, and raise investment as needed.”
Invests in startups and small businesses
SeedLegals was founded by Anthony Rose and Laurent Laffy in 2016 in London. The co-founder Laffy detailed the questions founders should ask themselves before fundraising in a post on TFN. They had experienced enough of paying insane amounts of money to lawyers for the same legal documents at every funding round, and funding rounds taking months to negotiate and close. They decided to change it with the debut of this lawtech platform that invests in startups and small businesses.
The company employs over 150 people, operating across the UK, Ireland, France, Singapore and Hong Kong, making a future of boarderless legals a real possibility.
“SeedLegals is also the #1 provider of EMI Option Schemes in the UK, we help companies get back their R&D cashbacks, and our Team feature helps companies easily hire people and manage their teams. And lots more coming soon,” Rose added.
What does SeedLegals do?
It automates the legal processes that startups and small businesses need ranging from funding to option schemes, contracts, and R&D tax credits. It cuts down the time and expense companies used to spend with traditional lawyers and accountants. The platform also offers an array of innovative agile funding services to help founders raise money from one-off investments to full funding round and top-ups in between.
The platform helps companies build and negotiate term sheets, shareholder agreements, cap tables, stock option allocations, EIS approvals, hiring agreements, NDAs and more. It also has two new products: SeedFAST and Instant Investment, which enable startups to quickly top up investment between funding rounds.
The platform replaces spreadsheets and Word docs with a database-driven platform. Businesses have to enter data once and the system uses pre-built knowledge, deal data, and document automation to dynamically build all the outputs.
Achievements by SeedLegals
It is touted to have closed more UK investment rounds than any other company or law firm. Having worked with over 35,000 UK companies and investors, SeedLegals has a detailed knowledge of the startup ecosystem. In 2021, companies focused on improving information sharing and communication raised over five times more than the next-highest grossing sector, which is retail.
Of the startups that raised funding, 28% had at least one female founder, and 12% were led by an all-female team. The average age of founders in the most investable industries differed by sector. Overall, female founders were an average age of 45, male founders averaged 38 years old.
