The London-based company Apperio, which provides legal spend analytics and matter tracking software, said today it has raised a $7 million growth round of venture capital funding. It will use the funding to further develop its product for corporate counsel, meet growing demand from law firms for new functionality, and accelerate its expansion to the U.S. market.
The announcement today brings the total funding Apperio has raised to date to $19.9 million.
The investment was led by Molten Ventures (formerly Draper Esprit), with participation from Notion Capital, IQ Capital, Nextlaw Ventures, Volution and Hambro Perks, which provided venture debt. Both Volution and Hambro Perks are new investors in this round.
Learn more about Apperio in the LawNext Legal Tech Directory.
“It’s no secret venture funding has slowed across technology sectors,” said Apperio Non-Executive Chairman David Eldridge. “That Apperio closed on funding with both new and existing investors, in this environment, speaks volumes to the company’s unique position in the legal technology sector, the value the company is delivering to customers and the significant opportunities ahead.”
Richard Marsh, chief portfolio officer at Molten Ventures, said that Apperio is impressive for its focus on where and how its technology delivers value to customers and how to expand that.
“Over the past year, product development has expanded Apperio’s remit from legal expenditure into other major professional services relationships, including accounting and audit,” Marsh said. “This has significantly grown the value potential for customers and the globally addressable market for the company.”
Related: In Defense of the Billable Hour: A LawNext Interview with Apperio CEO Nicholas d’Adhemar.
Apperio’s founder and CEO, Nicholas d’Adhemar, is a lawyer turned private equity investment manager who got the idea for the company when he noticed his PE firm was often surprised by the size of law firm invoices. Fees charged by outside legal service providers would frequently exceed the cost of the estimate given at the outset, with little to no visibility that this had occurred until the invoice landed.
Having worked in a law firm previously, d’Adhemar knew that, given the pace and intensity of the work around deals, both the client and the firm can lose track of just how much time the firm had booked. Believing there was a better way, he founded Apperio.
Apperio’s product provides in-house counsel with a comprehensive view of their legal spending on a single dashboard. The platform aggregates and analyzes both historical and current legal spend, including work-in-progress, and provides a streamlined invoice approval workflow. The software does this, in part, by connecting directly to the practice management systems of law firms.
With that view, legal departments can see in real-time when the budget for a legal matter meets a certain threshold and then decide whether to raise the issue with the law firm.
Apperio says it has more than 60 corporate counsel customers, including Network Rail, Cornerstone, Phoenix Group and Royal London, and more than 250 global law firms connected to the Apperio platform.
“We’re deeply grateful to our investors whose commitment has enabled Apperio to think differently about this enduring problem of transparency in the business of law,” said d’Adhemar. “We’re looking forward to their continued collaboration in this next chapter as we build out our legal spend management software and strive to strengthen the relationship between corporate counsel and their law firms.”
