Just last year, the legal software company LawVu placed ninth in Deloitte’s Fast 50 Index, a list that ranks New Zealand’s fastest-growing companies in the world. Now the company has just secured a $15 million funding round.
Like many successful start-ups LawVu was founded by a problem CEO and Co-Founder, Sam Kidd, personally faced.
The legal world is a complicated and daunting industry for someone with no experience in the realm of law, which is the situation Kidd found himself in.
“I’d been working in this project management world and it was all about transparency and communication. Then we started engaging with lawyers and it seemed to be the polar opposite,” he says.
Realising there were no systems in New Zealand that would make it easier for legal teams, Kidd alongside his Co-Founder Tim Boyne created LawVu as a way to “scratch my own itch”.
LawVu is created to make business workflows and processes easier and accessible for legal teams through technology.
Kidd and Boyne worked on creating technology that put everything on one platform and within three years, LawVu had clients all across the world.
A vision to go global since day one made it easier for LawVu to expand into the US, UK and Australian markets.
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“I actually thought the New Zealand market would take off fast, but you almost need to be successful offshore, and then you come back and everyone’s like well now that you’re successful offshore, we’ll start to take you seriously,” he says.
Recently, LawVu has been able to achieve $15 million NZD in funding through Movac – one of the country’s top technology investor venture capital firm – in order to meet a growing demand internationally.
Kidd says the appetite for this product is growing, especially as the legal tech market is predicted to be valued over $40 billion by 2030.
However, getting legal teams to adopt the technology was not an easy task, especially in a field with years and years of history.
“There was a lot of educating the market in the early days, with people who were looking at us being like, ‘does it really need to exist?’, but we found those early adopters are people that got what we were doing,” he says.
“That gave us that; ‘yes we are doing the right thing’, but we had to be super resilient because you got a lot more no’s and a lot more people saying that this just isn’t a thing.”
With this recent funding secured, Kidd says LawVu has now become mature and had a strategy that “quite baked”, allowing the start-up to stay focused and push for growth, especially when raising capital is hard.
“It’s a validation for the team that they’re doing the right things and chasing the right sort of stuff,” adds Kidd.
He says that the $15 million allows the business the breathing room to do what they want to do and focus on building technology.
Spending the capital will allow LawVu to keep putting money and investing in the areas that focus on growth in overseas.
Specifically, LawVu is focused on building and improving the platform across the board, and integrating products to allow for a better user experience.
“We’ve integrated with ChatGPT through Microsoft, and so, we’re actually being able to bring all those tools into a platform that our customers can use,” he explains.
Through this, LawVu aims to become the dominant platform in this space.
“I suppose it sounds like world domination, but I think from New Zealand why not? Why can’t we be the dominating product globally in this space,” he says.
“You want to win and you enjoy what you’re doing and you look at the opportunity that’s there and it’s like, we can build massive world class companies from New Zealand. We want to be a company like Xero or Rocket Lab and just become completely synonymous with this space.”
