On Tuesday, London-based Augmetec, a legal tech startup announced that it has raised over £2M (approximately €2.4M) in seed funding led by UK-based early-stage investors Fuel Ventures.
Fuel Ventures is a UK venture capital fund specialising in early-stage high-growth technology startup investments. Since its inception in 2014, Fuel Ventures has invested over £215M into more than 180 UK companies.
Oliver Hammond, Partner at Fuel Ventures, says, “We’re so excited to be working with Augmetec. We’ve seen internal investigations within corporations increase significantly as regulation grows and levels of improper conduct increase. As such, corporations are being required to investigate thoroughly and fairly.”
“Progress in AI and automation means we think the time is now to automate and maximise the efficiency to a significant degree in that process, allowing corporations to come to conclusions quicker and more accurately. We think Augmetec is going to revolutionise this industry,” adds Hammond.
Other investors, including Swiss fund 14Peaks Capital, and three industry angel investors, including a retired Senior Partner at Kirkland & Ellis, the family office of NetDocuments’ original founding team, and the Head of Fraud at Rajah & Tann Singapore, participated in the round.
Fund utilisations
The UK company will use the funds to grow its client base, fund its product development, and level up its offering on a global scale.
Additionally, the company has plans to expand its team by hiring key personnel in engineering, compliance, operations, and sales.
Furthermore, the capital will be used to strengthen its international enterprise partnerships and invest in developing new features and enhancements for the LEIAA platform.
Ethics and compliance investigations have traditionally been slow, costly, and inconsistent.
What does Augmetec solve?
With rising global enforcement actions for non-compliance, especially under regulations like the UK Bribery Act and the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, penalties have surpassed $375B since the 2007-2008 financial crisis.
New whistleblower regulations and a growing corporate ‘speak up’ culture are expected to increase the number of investigations further.
This added scrutiny not only requires significant time and money from corporations but also strains important resources.
Here’s where Augmetec comes into play!
Combating inefficiencies in corporate investigations
Founded and led by Kritin Sundaram, Augmetec has developed an end-to-end SaaS platform — LEIAA.
It is designed to eliminate inefficiencies for organisations when conducting internal ethics, compliance, and regulatory investigations.
The company does it by using advanced AI and automation to optimise time and cost and to increase investigative precision.
The SaaS platform provides the necessary tools to manage and conduct entire end-to-end investigations, from inception to reporting, data analysis to witness interviews, and everything in between.
This means they can make data-driven decisions, optimise cost, alleviate the strain on valuable resources, and increase precision.
The company also has ISO27001 and SOC II security certifications, relevant integrations, and technology partner relationships with a host of enterprise platforms including the likes of Relativity, iManage and NetDocuments.
Flexible business model built for scalability
Talking about the primary business model to Silicon Canals, Kritin Sundaram says, “We are a SaaS organisation and charge on a “per user” basis (either per month or per year). Teams look to obtain annual discounts for “core” teams working on investigations year-round, with the ability to spin up additional support on a monthly active user basis as and when required. This flexibility moves with client needs and provides for a scalable environment. The way that our platform is structured permits easy auto-scaling and ensures consistent speed and security.”
According to Sundaram, the company plans to develop its business model by utilising its cutting-edge AI and automation technologies to provide market-leading tools in a secure, stable, and efficient manner.
“We do not build tools “for the sake of it”. We identify focused problems and build specific solutions to solve such problems. Where we can leverage AI and automation to do so, we do,” says Sundaram. “We have a dedicated R&D team to research, identify, experiment, and build state-of-the-art tools to integrate. Our team is constantly iterating and innovating to ensure the latest technological developments are implemented in our platform. ”
Additionally, the company offers enterprise integrations to access corporate data, along with managed services and locally deployable options. This allows their product to easily adapt to the specific needs of their clients.
Expanding beyond regulatory investigations
Augmetec is exploring plans to expand beyond regulatory investigations into broader legal and compliance markets.
Explaining about expanding its businesses beyond regulatory investigations, he says “Some of our upcoming technology (currently under development) is set to redefine the compliance and data analysis market. We will provide this as a standalone solution as well as an integration into our platform, LEIAA.”
With the data accessible through LEIAA, the company intends to broaden its services into the preventative aspect of compliance, highlighting proactive measures like detecting and preventing threats as and when they occur over merely reactionary responses.
“We are positioning Augmetec to own the ethics and compliance space, from end to end,” he adds.
Partnerships and M&A’s
At present, Augmetec has integrations with major platforms such as Microsoft and Google, and it is identified as a “technology partner” with iManage and NetDocuments—two of the world’s leading document management systems for law firms.
“We are also a development partner for Relativity, integrating with their platform as well to provide seamless connectivity,” he says.
On the customer acquisition side, the company is in discussion with channel partners to rapidly expand its global reach, with an upcoming announcement involving a multi-billion-dollar organisation.
With clients across three continents, Augmetec aims to capitalise on its existing presence to achieve market dominance in its sector.
“Our vision is to ease the overwhelming burden placed on the shoulders of investigative teams handling numerous, often complex, and multi-faceted investigations, which frequently involve multiple stakeholders across jurisdictions. With the growing number of global investigations, we believe we have built Augmetec at the perfect time to meet this ever-evolving need given the wider international regulatory landscape,” concludes Sundaram.
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