Belgian contract drafting legal tech company Henchman announces today (2 March) that it has closed a €6.5m Series A to support global growth and innovation in its platform. Founded in 2020, Henchman automates the search for relevant clauses and definitions when drafting legal contracts. In January, it announced an integration with OpenAI’s large language model GPT-3.
The funding round is led by Adjacent VC and Acton Capital and joined by the London-based Conviction VC and several business angels (including the founders of a Belgian success story, Showpad).
Legal professionals rarely start from a blank sheet of paper when drafting contracts or negotiating details with other parties. They usually reference existing documentation, for which they need to sift through countless old contracts or talk to colleagues to find suitable precedents that could be relevant to their case. Henchman helps to solve this problem by automatically centralising past clauses and definitions from any legal team’s contract database (whether law firm or corporate legal department) and delivering them intelligently within familiar Microsoft Word or Outlook environments.
“When everyone was still talking about ChatGPT, we already started implementing the technology in Henchman,” says Gilles Mattelin (pictured one from the right below), co-founder of Henchman. With the AI feature, lawyers can now use Henchman to enrich contracts with new suggestions, translations or grammatical adaptations.
The founders, who also include Jorn Vanysacker (pictured on the left above) and Wouter Van Respaille (pictured right above), started working on their legal tech solution during the COVID-pandemic. Henchman has been on a remarkable trajectory since its launch in June 2021, experiencing rapid adoption and growth over the past year, achieving 750% revenue growth. Its team has grown from 12 to 35 employees (also pictured above is head of customer and partner success, Siska Lanoo), and it has attracted 100 new customers across 15 different countries, including the UK, where clients include Avery Law, Mercuræ, and Marlborough House Partners.
“Today we have the all-star team, the drive and the entourage to maintain our technological lead in solving a universal problem for the legal profession,” said Vanysacker.
Adjacent VC previously invested in companies such as BeReal, Revolut and Cowboy; and German Acton Capital, previously funded Clio and Etsy. The other investors include Louis Jonckheere & Pieterjan Bouten from Showpad; Felix Van de Maele, founder of Collibra; and Bram Couvreur, a partner at U.S.-based law firm Cooley.
“After a few reference calls it became clear that the power of Henchman is how perfectly the product fits into the legal professionals’ existing workflow. It is rare to see a SaaS company win international clients this early in its journey, but the teams’ customer obsession already drove adoption across Europe and in the US. I am excited to team up as we scale to the next level!” said Nico Wittenborn, founder of Adjacent VC.
caroline@legaltechnology.com
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