Allen & Overy’s tech hub Fuse has selected fifteen digital asset and legal tech companies to become part of its seventh cohort, four of which are legal tech alumni.
The magic circle firm ran two different streams for applications: legal and regtech companies that it may work with in the practise or business of law; and then companies through which it can learn about new technologies. It is that second stream that this year will comprise of companies focused on NFTs, payment and security tokens, and derivatives. Those companies are:
Bitbond: Helps financial institutions to create digital assets easily and securely through enterprise-grade tokenisation technology, allowing for an immutable and transferable proof of ownership. Manages the token lifecycle with distribution and payment automation functionality.
BondEvalue: Helps investors instantly trade bonds in both full and fractional sizes through their bank or broker via an exchange with transparent prices, enabled by blockchain technology.
Chainalysis: Helps government agencies, financial institutions and cybersecurity companies to analyse blockchain data through its investigation, compliance, and market intelligence software. Chainalysis builds trust in blockchains to promote more financial freedom with less risk.
Hunit: Helps lawyers turn conventional, natural language agreements into self-executing smart legal contracts.
Inveztor: Helps debt capital market participants to streamline the issuance and management of escrows and bonds. The platform connects participants, digitises deal management processes and enhances operations in a real-time, transparent environment.
Komainu: Helps institutional investors to hold digital assets in a segregated and regulated environment by providing a custodial service solution built on institutional grade technology, which is supported by risk and compliance standards developed alongside a global investment bank.
Millicent: Helps financial institutions and their clients to issue and instantly settle digital money using shared ledger payments technology.
Meanwhile, Fuse’s new business of law startups are:
10BE5: Helps lawyers quickly draft capital markets disclosures and conduct associated due diligence processes by using advanced data analytics, computer vision, and natural language processing techniques, cutting down the time spent on manual and laborious tasks.
Enigio: Helps companies to create freely transferable digital documents and assets. Enigio’s trace:original is a generic solution that can be used to securely transfer both value and data between any entity and/or organisation without the need for onboarding.
Pactio: Helps private equity investors, accountants and lawyers to close deals seamlessly and build a single source of truth for investment ownership, structures and cap tables across the investment lifecycle.
Phosphor: Helps deal teams accelerate the underwriting and closing process for real asset acquisitions and financings. Phosphor combines the financial model, legal documentation, and other key deal data into standardised building blocks on a common, synchronised platform. This enables deal teams and counsel to focus on the unique aspects of a transaction.
The legal tech alumni working with Fuse are:
Amplified Global: Helps internal legal teams objectively assess and simplify the language used in contracts and other legal documents. It helps create efficiencies in the contract drafting process and allows for standardisation of language and clauses.
Avvoka: Helps lawyers draft and negotiate any legal document, leveraging structured contract data to create better commercial outcomes by monitoring negotiation patterns and clause variations. The powerful no-code automation editor empowers more users to generate accurate documents at scale.
Definely: Helps lawyers to more easily access defined terms and references in documents by providing a 360 degree ‘one click’ solution to drafting and reviewing documents.
DraftWise: Helps lawyers to draft new contracts, quickly find relevant precedents and manage preferred clauses and defined terms, all within Microsoft Word.
Fuse head Shruti Ajitsaria, said: ‘This year, we had the largest number of applications, both for the legal tech stream and via client nomination. The potential for the digital assets companies to be transformational is enormous and we are excited to work with them and our nominating clients. The legal tech companies have been chosen with the assistance of partners across our global network and address pain points that we have identified. We have a great cohort of companies and we all – Fuse, the cohort, A&O lawyers and our clients – have an exciting year ahead.’
A&O has worked with several of the startups and John Kwan, co-Founder of 10BE5, commented: “We are privileged to have worked with A&O on a number of high-profile matters. We are excited to build on that relationship as we continue to develop and release a suite of complementary products that will serve A&O and its clients across a spectrum of matters.”
You can watch a short video on the new cohort here: Meet the entrepreneurs who are new to Fuse Cohort 7 (2023)