Juro has raised a $5m Series A round led by Union Square Ventures (USV)The New York-based fund were early backers of Twitter, Twilio and KickstarterJuro is a contract management platform with customers operating in 50 countriesThe investment will fuel Juro’s growth from its London and Riga offices
UK headquartered contract management platform Juro has raised a $5m Series A led by New York-based Union Square Ventures (USV) – the backers of Twitter, Twilio, Etsy and Kickstarter – amid a number of other high profile backers.
USV, which is an investor in legal research company Casetext, was joined in the round by existing investors including Point Nine Capital, Seedcamp, Taavet Hinrikus (co-founder of TransferWise) and Paul Forster (co-founder of Indeed). The Series A takes Juro’s total funds raised to $8m.
Juro was founded in 2016 by former Freshfields lawyer Richard Mabey and Pavel Kovalevich. It has offices in London and Riga and counts among its clients corporates including Deliveroo, Skyscanner, Envoy, Babylon Health and Reach.
Juro says it will use the funds to double-down on its data proposition*, triple the size of its product team and continue to expand its growing customer base in the EU and US. John Buttrick, partner at USV, will join the Board.
Mabey said: “Contract management systems are invariably designed by lawyers for lawyers. We’re rebuilding contracts for the end user. We’re delighted to partner with USV as we execute on our vision to transform legal contracts into dynamic, modular agreements that reflect and empower business relationships. It’s great to see so many businesses supporting this approach and joining our community.”
John Buttrick, partner at Union Square Ventures, said: “We look for founders with products equipped to change an industry. While contract management might not be new, Juro’s transformative vision for it certainly is. There’s no greater proof of the product’s ease of use than the fact that we negotiated and closed the funding round in it. We’re delighted to support Juro’s team in making their vision a reality.”
The investment caps a strong year for Juro, named by FT Intelligent Business as a global innovator in contracting, and Mabey as one of the top ten legal business technologists globally.
Juro was represented in the transaction by Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati and Taylor Wessing. Union Square Ventures was represented by Latham & Watkins and Gunderson Dettmer.
*We asked what this means in reality and were told: “The short version is it means hiring more data scientists and machine learning engineers! The long version is that lots of the long-term vision of the company is about letting people access the insights from their contracts data – one of the most frustrating things about contracts historically is they contain the lifeblood of the business and so much actionable intelligence (your most common negotiation points, clause language that causes problems, stakeholders that sit on documents, risk levels, financial exposure, and so on) but if your contract is a static file, like a PDF, it’s almost impossible to find and action that data. The more contracts that are created in Juro as machine-readable structured data, the more insights people can have into their legal processes, because it’s all searchable and available to Juro’s analytics stack from day one.”