Kiwi legaltech startup LawVu, a collaboration tool for in-house legal teams, has raised $2.5 million in a funding round involving Australian, US and New Zealand investors. It’s another major milestone for founder Sam Kidd.
The latest round follows a 2020 funding investment of $3.65 million, with its legaltech suite of tools used by clients including Fonterra, Nissan and PwC.
Sam Kidd has plans for LawVu to become the type of success story that Pushpay and Xero have been in New Zealand and he has been careful to calibrate the amount of money he raised, and when he raised it.
That is one reason he has previously rejected a $US10 million offer in its first raise. The company is close to eclipsing the Australian market as its biggest revenue earner with the US market growing rapidly for the startup, which was founded in 2015.
He took a smaller, $2.3 million capital notes investment to permit the company to expand and to avoid missing the opportunity to take the company into the wider, global market and maximising its potential earnings and profitability.
The company has hired former Xero executive Ross Jenkins to help lead the global charge.
Kidd said he realised early on how unstructured the legal business was, being ripe for the introduction of smart technology. One of his first corporate clients in Australia was Telstra after he set the legal in-house market as his target for growth.
The COVID crisis also provided something of a catalyst for further growth, stimulating the need for legal teams in-house to upskill in terms of the technology tools that were required in the current environment.
