[update: October 24, 2018]
Added the line graph from the LegalTech Funding Landscape infographic to LegalTech Charts.
Two FinTech companies impacting legal are payment providers primarily focused on protecting customer privacy. Their core feature is to process payments anonymously in cryptocurrency or regular payments transactions.
The line chart below only displays funding in Legal Tech and Law. The LegalZoom round (August update below) inflated the law category and ballooned July. See the more bubbles in Law with the “Others” interactive chart. The below categories are present in the infographic line graph (pdf).
[chart id=”8082″]
[update: September 5, 2018]
Kira systems just pushed us passed $3 Billion in funding for 2018..yup, it’s the new normal.
Download: LP-LT Funding 2018-v9.pdf
[update: August 9, 2018]
LegalZoom raised $500 Million and DocuSign acquired SpringCM for a reported $202 million. While the SpringCM acquisition is not the same as raising venture capital, it does express a vote of confidence in a turbulent market. Therefore, July just bumped June as the richest month Legal Tech has ever seen.
But wait..there is more. This month also saw the announcement of Block.one receiving funding from Peter Thiel, after it raised $4 billion (!) with an initial coin offering back in February.
So we had to update the initial infographic to include the elephants.
[orginal post]
In the first half of 2018 Legal Tech raised $1.2 billion in cash. If that isn’t crazy enough, we are ignoring a possible $3.7 billion raised with initial coin offerings (ICO). We previously discussed those blockchain startups impacting legal but we didn’t talk about the elephant.
What’s more amazing is that we are only half-way 2018 but surpassed the amount raised in all of the past 3 years combined. Bear in mind, @Legalpioneer also registered 6 undisclosed rounds by private companies this year and we aren’t perfect so we could have missed others.
| Year | Total rounds raised |
| 2017 | $385 million |
| 2016 | $280 million |
| 2015 | $366 million |
| Total | $1.03 billion |
A little nuance: some of the larger rounds were debt financing which is a bit odd but not unusual. The other concern is that seed financing in 2018 is trending downwards compared to previous years. It seems Venture Capital (VC) is more attracted to mature Legal Tech.
| Year | # startups receiving seed or angel funding | # startups receiving later stage funding |
| 2018 | 10 | 25 |
| 2017 | 28 | 48 |
| 2016 | 39 | 40 |
| 2015 | 23 | 31 |
| 2014 | 27 | 13 |
The Elephant
Also note: RiskTech startups grew not only in numbers mainly nudge by GDPR, their funding generally did as well. Check out the huge rounds by privacy apps Signal and Orchid lab. Both dwarfed by the elephant called Telegram which raised a ridiculous ICO of $1.7 billion.
We still have 6 more months in 2018 but it seems we all value a fair society a little bit more these days.