Canadian cloud-based legal entity management platform, Athennian, has raised $7M CAD in a Series A extension, adding to an initial $8 million CAD round in September 2020
Athennian’s SaaS platform manages critical entity data and automates corporate secretary documents.The extension brings Athennian’s total financing to date to $17 million CAD, which includes a $2 million seed financing round from Q3 2019.
We speak to founder and CEO Adrian Camara about this latest raise, including why the Series A was extended.
Athennian raised $10m towards the end of this year, was it not anticipated that you needed further funds or what is the reason behind the extension a few months later?
We chose to extend our Series A funding to support Athennian’s growth during the pandemic. Extending the round also gave us the opportunity to bring in new investors, including Touchdown Ventures and Clio CEO, Jack Newton.
What has happened since we caught up at the last funding round, what key developments can you highlight? Revenue? Hires?
It has certainly been a busy, few months. Our revenue and headcount have more than doubled since September.
There is no doubt that the current business climate has caused the workloads of in-house legal teams and paralegals to increase dramatically, driving the need for more automation, and, as a result, driving increased demand in our market-leading cloud-based legal entity management platform.
To support that growth, we have needed to expand the team and we saw the pandemic as an opportunity to hire wherever the best talent is located. The result is that half of our team now resides outside of our headquarters in Calgary, Canada. In fact, we will be shifting to an agile office model that looks more like coworking than traditional office space from now on.
Have there been any product updates?
We will be releasing an open API in Q2. Legal departments and law firms hold tens of millions of data points on the ownership, control, and identity of business entities, which need to be integrated into other systems and workflows
Last, but not least, one of your new investors is none other than Jack Newton, Clio’s CEO. How did that come about?
Jack has been a personal friend and mentor of mine for several years. I have learnt a lot from him, particularly around scaling a business, as he has done with Clio. Jack took the decision to invest in Athennian on the back of our rapid revenue growth, and we’re delighted to have him on-board.
What can we expect to see from Athennian in the next few months following this further funding extension?
We are focused on expanding our customer base in the United States and Canada. We are finding huge volumes of the market are very excited to upgrade to Athennian’s cloud from very old software like Diligent Entities, CT, CSC and Computershare GEMS.
Tells us one fun fact that no-one knows about Athennian?
We aren’t from Athens.
caroline.hill@legalitlexicon.com