UK-founded visual modelling startup StructureFlow today (30 May) announces that it has closed a $6m Series A funding round as it targets further growth in the United States and looks to expand the use cases for its successful transactional product.
StructureFlow helps legal teams to digitally visualise corporate structures, moving away from the time-consuming process of manually mapping out complex corporate information, particularly during a transaction such as an acquisition.
Founded in 2018 by Tim Follett, a former associate at Slaughter and May and Farrer & Co, StructureFlow is now used by UK top 20 law firms Slaughter and May, A&O Shearman, Linklaters and Norton Rose Fulbright, as well as Am Law 100 law firms Baker McKenzie and Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner.
The Series A, which brings StructureFlow’s total funding to $15m, was led by US-based FinTech fund FINTOP Capital. One of the partners of FINTOP is Jim McKelvey, who co-founded Square with Jack Dorsey, who went on to become CEO of Twitter. FINTOP, headquartered in Nashville, notably also last year invested in transaction management platform Legatics.
Speaking to Legal IT Insider, Follett said: “Already around 30% of our business is from the US but a lot of it is in New York and these guys have a great network, so they are opening up further opportunities for us.” FINTOP partner Chris Haley will join the StructureFlow board. Interestingly, Follett met Haley at The Legal Technology Fund conference in Miami last year.
While StructureFlow had what Follett describes as a “solid year” last year, it was a build year rather than a grow year, meaning it rebuilt its application over a 12-month period, and that went live towards the end of 2023.
“We’re now really set up for growth this year and we can already see that kicking in,” Follett says.
With regard to what the new investment means on a product level, Follett says: “We’re really doubling down on AI and visualising underlying data, whatever that may be. If you take a contract, or an email, we can automatically visualise what’s going on in those sources so that someone doesn’t have to manually visualise what’s going on from scratch, and that’s the direction of travel we’re going in. That’s what we think the market needs.”
Data visualisation has long been used in the eDiscovery space and to help compliance and risk teams, however interestingly it has not typically been seen as a BAU tool for lawyers, and this is a growing area.
Haley, who in an earlier career was an associate at Nashville law firm Bass, Berry & Sims, said in a statement announcing the Series A: “Legal and professional services around the world are feeling the strain from decades of economic, technical and social upheaval and are crying out for change. As both a former lawyer and former operator of technology scale-ups myself, I was struck by the clarity of Tim’s vision for StructureFlow, and the quality of the team that he has built around him to deliver on the promise of cutting through complexity. Change is coming to this industry, and Tim and his team, with their deep expertise across legal, SaaS and legal tech, are extremely well placed to deliver it.”