Henchman, a Ghent, Belgium-based contract drafting startup, announced that it has secured an additional €2M funding to close its Seed round at €3M. The funding comes nine months after securing €1M while announcing its launch.
The funding was led by Pitchdrive, along with the participation from private investors like Wim De Waele (Partner at Miles Ahead), Frederik Vandermarliere (CEO of VCF Cigars), and members of its own management team.
Gilles Mattelin, co-founder of Henchman, says, “Since Henchman requires no set-up and updates automatically, customers can immediately start repurposing thousands, even millions of clauses based on relevant suggestions. There’s an immediate added value in terms of efficiency and speed. Our goal is to enable lawyers to spend more time on high-value tasks that can set them apart from their competitors.”
Henchman: What you need to know
Founded by Gilles Mattelin and Jorn Vanysacker, Henchman has developed a Microsoft Word add-in that allows legal experts to draft contracts faster and efficiently.
Due to the plug-and-play connection with their database, previously written clauses are suggested easily even when contracts are scattered and stored in different folders.
Legal experts can search for them based on the party name, type of contract, length, drafting date, or specific words in a clause. The platform also highlights the differences between the paragraph that is used in the draft and the paragraph of a similar, previously used, clause that Henchman suggested.
Here is a brief video on how Henchman works:
Many law firms and legal teams, including Belgian boutique firms like Monard Law and Sioen, as well as international players such as Neuwerk (DE), Cleber (NL), and Avery Law (UK), use the Henchman tool. The company employs 20 people now.
Jorn Vanysacker, co-founder of Henchman, says, “Obviously, we have done our fair share of market research and we knew that there was a lot of market potential. Nevertheless, we are positively surprised by the high demand. Fortunately, customers can connect their database to Henchman and almost no intervention is needed from our side to start working with the tool. However, because our product is still young, we like to handle every request personally to understand the exact need and how we can provide an answer. To continue to ensure a smooth follow-up, and also to be able to quickly develop the right features, we looked for additional capital.”
Investor
Based out of Antwerp, Pitchdrive scales innovative startups faster by closing the gap between experienced angels and early-stage companies.
“Henchman manages to cleverly address a widespread problem faced by lawyers. With Pitchdrive, we can help the strong team behind Henchman grow even faster on a global scale,” says Lorenz Bogaert from Pitchdrive.
