Welcome to the March Orange Rag, where we break the news that legal revenue management startup ayora.ai has raised $1.6m pre-seed funding.
This is the second exclusive we’ve written about in a matter of days that focuses on a startup in the law firm billing and collections space. On 25 March we revealed that North Carolina-based law firm Ward and Smith has implemented the platform of Silicon Valley-based ‘invoice to cash’ startup Oddr.
The two startups do different things: Oddr is a back-end tool that streamlines bill creation and provides rules-based validation, exception management, metrics and dashboards. Billing emails are centralised and tracked.
Clients are able to pay into the same platform. Ayora is about the front end. It analyses billing and timesheet data to warn fee-earners when they are about to hit a cap or a billing deadline, and automates the necessary process within a workflow, eg generating an email to send to the client to renegotiate a cap or pause work.
With margins being squeezed, there is a huge focus among firms on leveraging technology to reduce lockup and write offs. Mishcon is a customer or ayora and went live this January, with Dan Sinclair, head of MDR Lab, commenting: “Working with ayora helped us understand the working capital challenge at a granular level.” At Ward and Smith, director of finance Jennifer Sutton said: “The Oddr platform represents a huge advancement in our team’s billing operations productivity.”
It will be interesting to see how these solutions complement or compete with the work that the likes of Aderant and Elite are doing to help improve WIP to cash. The PMS vendors have the same objectives and arguably similar solutions with Aderant’s MADDI and Elite’s eBillingHub but as always, startups who focus on doing just one thing
really well will often have an advantage, particularly as the PMS vendors face challenges around transitioning to the cloud.
For those of you into a bit of crystal ball gazing, we’d query whether revenue and collections will make for the next wave of M&A in the PMS space.
As always, in this issue of the Orange Rag we bring you all the latest wins and deals and other news from the past month. Interestingly it has been a very unusually quiet month for people moves, so we can only assume that you are all blissfully happy!
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