Ebilling startup Apperio, fresh from a recent £1.7m Series A funding round, has dipped into its pennies to hire Huddle’s former director of engineering, Stephen Wilcock as its chief technology officer.
Wilcock will help to develop Apperio’s existing offering, bringing extensive technology experience to enhance the platform and further support its clients’ needs. He will be working closely with founder and CEO Nicholas d’Adhemar.
“The legal sector is ripe for technology innovation and law firms across the world are waking up to the advantages of cloud-based SaaS solutions,” Wilcock said. “In the short time since Apperio’s launch, Nicholas and the team have already engaged some of the UK’s leading law firms and the business has a clear strategy for the future.”
At Huddle – a security focused cloud-based collaboration software company – Wilcock spent three years leading the engineering teams. Prior to this he spent ten years at OpenBet where, as VP of Engineering, he led the division responsible for their sports betting platform which is used to power most of the largest sports betting websites in the world.
Apperio, recently announced that it has closed a £1.7m seed funding round led by Notion Capital, with participation from NextLaw Labs and IQ Capital.
“To attract someone of Stephen’s caliber to Apperio in this stage of our evolution is a major coup for us. The technical and commercial expertise that Stephen brings is invaluable and hugely accelerates Apperio’s growth. I look forward to working alongside Stephen and the rest of the team to continue to develop the Apperio platform bringing transparency and efficiency to the legal industry and beyond,” d’Adhemar said.
The Apperio platform has already been adopted by 17 of the top 100 UK law firms, with more than £20m in fees being tracked since product launch in 2014. Its clients include European mid-market firm CapVest and UK fund manager Octopus Investments, which initially used the platform to manage their relationships with law firms including Kirkland & Ellis, Taylor Wessing and Olswang. However, since Olswang asked Apperio to develop a solution to give its fee-earners increased billing visibility and analytics, Apperio has modified its model so that it targets the private practice sector and gives corporate counsel a freemium version of its software.