Legal professionals usually refer to existing documentation, which involves sifting through hundreds of old contracts or talking to their colleagues to find suitable precedents that may be relevant to their case. A Belgian legal tech startup, Henchman that resolves this issue, has netted $7 million in Series A funding.
The round was led by a New York-based early-stage fund Adjacent VC that backed Ostrom, and a Munich-based VC fund Acton Capital that backed Seatti and Convelio, alongside participation from several business angels, including Louis Jonckheere & Pieterjan Bouten (founders Showpad), Felix Van de Maele (founder Collibra) and Bram Couvreur (Partner at U.S.-based law firm Cooley).
With this round, the total funding raised by Henchman is now $10 million and follows the recent GPT-3 integration. The company aims to become the industry-leading contract drafting and negotiation solution. Henchman intends to use the funds to stay ahead of the competition and enter new markets.
“When everyone was still talking about ChatGPT, we implemented the technology in Henchman,” said Gilles Mattelin, Founder of Henchman.
“After a few reference calls it became clear that Henchman’s power lies within how perfectly the product fits into the legal professionals’ existing workflow. It’s rare to see a SaaS company win international clients this early in its journey, but the teams’ customer obsession is driving great adoption in both Europe and the US. I’m excited to team up as we scale to the next level!” said Nico Wittenborn, Investor at Adjacent VC.
Louis Jonckheere, private investor and founder of Showpad, said “The legal profession is entering a new age with AI. I’m very bullish about Henchman’s ability to take a leading role in this transformation. They have the team, technology and traction to become a dominant global player.”
Helps lawyers with AI
Founded by Jorn Vanysacker, Gilles Mattelin, and Wouter Van Respaille in 2021 during the pandemic, Henchman helps the lawyer of the future provide added value and expertise. With AI, lawyers can now use Henchman to enrich contracts with new suggestions, translations, or grammatical adaptations.
This legal tech startup enables legal professionals to draft and negotiate complex contracts faster by automatically extracting previously written clauses from their existing contract database, when and where they need it. Henchman turns legal professionals into data-driven lawyers that outperform their competition.
It frees lawyers from complex and time-consuming tasks by automatically centralising past clauses and definitions from any legal team’s contract database, be it a law firm or corporate legal department, and delivers them intelligently in familiar Microsoft Word or Outlook environments.
Since its debut, Henchman has been on a remarkable trajectory and has experienced rapid adoption and growth over the past year. It witnessed a whopping 750% revenue growth, over 100 customers in 15 countries, and a team that grew from 12 to 35 employees.
