Follett: International expansion
A start-up that creates visual models of complex legal transactions, set up by a former City solicitor, is planning to open an office in the US next year after a $6m funding boost, led by American investors.
Tim Follett, chief executive and founder of StructureFlow, said the London-based company was already hiring in the US and, if this went well, an office would follow.
Around a third of StructureFlow’s clients are based in the US, a similar proportion in the UK, and the rest in Europe, Asia and Australia.
He described it as a “global business”, which would be taking part in a UK government trade mission to Texas next month and, also in June, entering a six-month legaltech incubator programme in Toronto.
Having raised £6.5m in previous rounds, the company’s Series A funding was led by US-based fintech fund FINTOP Capital, with further investment from Venrex, part of Select Equity Group, a US asset management fund.
Mr Follett qualified at and worked for Slaughter and May before moving to Farrer & Co and setting up StructureFlow in 2017.
He said the $6m (around £4.7m) raised in the latest funding round would give the company all the capital it needed for the “foreseeable future”.
After the US, Asia and Australia would probably be the next priorities for expansion, but this would involve setting up a new office and there were no plans to do that yet.
Around 80% of the company’s clients are law firms, including three out of the five UK magic circle firms and a number of top 100 US firms. A further 10% were accounting firms and other businesses and the remainder in-house legal departments.
Almost all of StructureFlow’s in-house clients came to it “organically”, after seeing the software used by their external law firms.
Mr Follett said it was beginning to target in-house teams directly and this would increase over the next two years.
“We will be doing a lot of this, but we want to do it properly. How can we connect the two sides of the ecosystem? All of this is super-exciting for us.”
Mr Follett explained that, by using generative artificial intelligence, StructureFlow could extract data from uploaded contracts and pre-populate diagrams, which lawyers could then manipulate. All of this could be done “in seconds, when before it would have taken hours”.
He said StructureFlow was “creating a new type of software”, based on the need to visualise data but with diagrams as “the means, not the end”.
The end was “unlocking the inherent power of humans” to “ingest and understand” data through their eyes.
Chris Haley, partner at FINTOP Capital, commented: “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.”
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