Legislate closes £1m seed funding round

Legislate secures £1m to help simplify contracting for businesses and landlords using knowledge graph technology

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Legislate Technologies, a legal technology startup building a SaaS platform to enable small businesses and landlords to easily create, sign, and manage contracts, has secured a £1 million seed round. Investors include Parkwalk Advisors – the UK’s most active investor in the university spin-out sector investing from its Opportunities EIS fund – alongside Perivoli Innovations and private investors. The raise will enable the company to accelerate the development of its platform and go to market in the UK. This investment follows a £150,000 pre-seed round, raised from private investors and closed in January 2020.

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Legislate is part of the growing ecosystem of Oxford startups and spinouts that tackle some of the world’s toughest problems with technology built on cutting-edge research. Legislate’s patent-pending knowledge graph enables it to streamline the process of creating contracts and aggregating contract data to quickly unlock valuable insights. Legislate delivers robust, fair agreements, saving both parties time and money and giving users confidence in the enforceability and quality of their contracts.

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Legislate targets large landlords and small businesses that create too few contracts to justify legal counsel yet complete a sufficient volume within the year to require a robust, prudent, and high-quality foundation. Large landlords can utilise Legislate to streamline the creation and management of tenancy agreements and aggregate rental statistics. Currently such data is often manually extracted from contracts and stored in legacy spreadsheets – a lengthy process that is open to error. Legislate’s NDA and employment agreements aim to assist small and medium-sized businesses by helping them understand potential contracting scenarios, such as the impact of pay increases on payroll.

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Commenting on the impact of the funding for the business, Charles Brecque, CEO and founder of Legislate Technologies, said: “This funding will help us accelerate product development and go to market in the UK. Since launching our closed-beta service in June 2020, we have organically doubled our user base every month. We now have more than 800 users, including a handful of early adopters of our paid subscription. Simple legal documents, such as NDAs and tenancy agreements, can be surprisingly frustrating and time-consuming to create, negotiate, and manage, wasting valuable time for landlords and small businesses who don’t have in-house or retained legal support. We saw an opportunity to apply knowledge graph technology to the problem and create a delightful, streamlined contracting experience.”

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Alun Williams, Investment Director at Parkwalk Advisors, the leading investor in UK university spinouts, said: “Parkwalk are delighted to have invested in Legislate Technologies. They have made a really arduous, lengthy process of contracts into a simple, easy to use product, that works for both sides of the negotiation. We are really looking forward to seeing Legislate Technologies go to market in the UK this year.”

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