March 2, 2023

Henchman raises $7 million Series A to support tomorrow’s lawyer with AI

Belgian legal tech company Henchman announced it has closed a $7 million Series A funding round. The round is led by the U.S.-based Adjacent and German Acton Capital and joined by Conviction VC and several business angels (including the Founders of Belgian success story, Showpad and Collibra). The funding follows on the heels of Henchman’s recent GPT-3 integration and will be used to strengthen its focus on innovation and expand geographically.

Henchman solves a global problem for lawyers and legal professionals with its software: it intelligently gives access to legal teams' previously written clauses and definitions. The founders, Jorn Vanysacker, Gilles Mattelin, and Wouter Van Respaille started working on their legal tech solution during the COVID-pandemic. Henchman has been on a remarkable trajectory since its launch in June of 2021 and has experienced rapid adoption and growth over the past year: 750% revenue growth, more than 100 new customers in 15 different countries, and a team that grew from 12 to 35 employees.

Henchman helps the lawyer of the future provide added value and expertise. "When everyone was still talking about ChatGPT, we already started implementing the technology in Henchman," says Gilles Mattelin, Founder of Henchman. With the AI-based functionality, lawyers can now use Henchman to enrich contracts with new suggestions, translations or grammatical adaptations.

"Today we have the all-star team, the drive and the entourage to maintain our technological lead in solving a global problem."

states Jorn Vanysacker, Founder at Henchman.

The company intends to use the injection of capital to stay ahead of the competition and enter new markets. To make that happen, the company brought some new investors on board: the U.S.-based Adjacent, which previously invested in companies such as BeReal, and the German Acton Capital, which previously funded Clio and Etsy, are taking the lead in this investment round, with participation from several business angels, including Louis Jonckheere & Pieterjan Bouten (founders Showpad), Felix Van de Maele (founder Collibra) and Bram Couvreur (Partner at U.S.-based law firm Cooley).

“After a few reference calls it became clear that the power of Henchman is how perfectly the product fits into the legal professionals’ existing workflow. It is rare to see a SaaS company win international clients this early in its journey, but the teams’ customer obsession already drove adoption across Europe and in the US. I am excited to team up as we scale to the next level!” says Nico Wittenborn, Investor at Adjacent.

Louis Jonckheere, one of the private investors and founder of Showpad, is optimistic: "The legal profession is entering a new age with AI. I’m very bullish about Henchman’s ability to take a leading role in this transformation. They have the team, technology and traction to become a dominant global player.”

$7m series A:
Innovation or Caviar Bumps?

We have been swamped lately, so we asked company friend Steve Lit to jump in for this announcement. Although he means well he might have gotten carried away after hearing the news.

Check out the video.

▸

About Adjacent

Adjacent is an early stage VC fund investing across Europe and the US. It was started by Nico Wittenborn in 2019 after years with Point Nine in Berlin and Insight Partners in NYC. You can learn more on www.adjacent.com and by following @adjacent.

About Acton Capital

Acton Capital is a leading growth venture capital investor based in Munich. Since 1999, the Acton team has been investing in technology-based startups with proven business models from Europe and North America. With more than two decades of investment experience and an in-depth understanding of digital transformation across a wide range of industries, Acton Capital has already supported around 100 start-ups such as AlphaSights, Clio, Etsy, HomeToGo, Mambu, Momox, Mytheresa or Zooplus on their way to international market leadership.

About Conviction VC

Conviction Venture Capital, part of Conviction Investment Partners, invests in post revenue B2B Software as a Service (SaaS) Ventures. Our focus is early-stage post revenue, product market fit, European businesses with high revenue growth potential. Conviction are a team of 15 with nearly 200 years of investing experience, with inhouse legal and compliance and full end to end investing capabilities. Since 2017, we have deployed over $100m under the Conviction umbrella across >20 portfolio companies. Conviction was built on the back of a syndicate of 150 investors and family offices that have been following the investments made by the GPS since the early 2000s as independents.

About Henchman

Henchman is the fastest contract drafting experience ever made. Using state-of-the-art technology, Henchman intelligently gives access to legal teams' previously written clauses and definitions.

Henchman employs 35 employees, has 100 customers in 15 different countries, and is founded by Gilles Mattelin (former Founder Intuo, acquired by Unit4 in 2019, Co-Founder Tout Bien Pils), Jorn Vanysacker (former CMO Intuo, former co-founder Rendeevoo) and Wouter Van Respaille (former PWC).