UK virtual data room provider Ruby Datum has closed its funding round at £195,000, most of which was raised on British investment crowdfunding platform Crowdcube. The investment comes as Ruby Datum, which already has a fully functional document management system, builds out its platform further to include task management and other workflow capabilities.
This is Ruby Datum’s first raise, and its Crowdcube target was £150,000. In fact, it raised £173,946 from 189 investors, who between them now have a 5.48% stake in the London-headquartered company. It plans to put the money into product development before it goes to market for a larger Series A investment.
Ruby Datum was founded in May 2016 by web developer Nick Watson, who is managing director and lead architect. The company now has a team of six full time staff. Timo Karakashev, who is CEO of events company Cosmonauts, is a director and 25% investor. Its customers include Mishcon de Reya (Ruby Datum signed a three-year contract with them in July 2020); Infarm; Quantuma; and Crowdcube itself is also a customer.
Virtual data rooms are regularly used for external document collaboration in legal transactions such as M&A, but Watson told Legal IT Insider that Ruby Datum launched because of a gap in the market. “A few of the clients I worked with needed a virtual data room, and despite there being lots out there they were slow and clunky and went offline for periods of time. We came up with a user-experience dominated version of a data room, and it’s pretty rapid,” he observed.
The platform was built from the start with scalability in mind and now Ruby Datum is building full document, data & task management facilities that can be interlinked & white-labelled, allowing firms to build their own SaaS products within Ruby Datum.
You can listen here to Watson talking to Legal IT Insider editor Caroline Hill about the growth of and strategy behind the platform:
Ruby Datum founder Nick Watson discusses platform and fundraise