We have been looking closely at tech in the legal space for some years. The sector has been relatively slow to adopt the advances in AI eagerly taken up by other industries, due to reasons as rudimentary as its per hour billing structure. But now the stars have aligned – right team, right product, right time – and we’re thrilled to be backing ThoughtRiver.

ThoughtRiver provides in-house and private practice legal teams with automated contract review technology. This means companies can increase their deal velocity, meaning they can do more deals and pull revenue forward.

ThoughtRiver’s technology addresses a fundamental problem for lawyers: you simply don’t know which part of a contract to focus on without reading the whole thing. The team has developed a sophisticated machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) engine that understands the contract at the sentence level and then assigns risks to what it finds, in the same way that a human lawyer would. This pre-screening work reduces the time that a lawyer needs to spend reviewing the contract by between 33% and 66%. When universally adopted it will help to drive the wheels of global commerce by making deals happen faster.

The ThoughtRiver technology is underpinned with Lexible, its trademarked digital universal contract description language. Lexible uses a sophisticated question and answer framework to allow users to get to grips with the contract faster and build a detailed picture of the obligations and rights within it. The ThoughtRiver team has established the Lexible Learning Center, which trains young lawyers in this universal contract description language and provides accreditation, making Lexible staple in the legal industry. Since 95% of lawyers use Microsoft Word for their work, ThoughtRiver integrates with it, embedding itself directly into the workflow, limiting behaviour change and increasing stickiness.

Tim Pullan, Founder and CEO, provides exceptional Founder Market Fit. Tim previously spent six years at Taylor Vinters as a Partner and four years in Asia Pacific where he was the managing director at Experian, a marketing and customer insights data analytics firm. Understanding the customer is second nature to Tim and his growing team take this in every direction and to every depth. ThoughtRiver’s customer base is already star-studded (PWC, Eversheds, Singtel, and G4S amongst others) and now the stage is set for spectacular growth.

We’re excited to be partnering with existing investors Crane, Local Globe and Zenoo Capital to support Tim and his team as they build a truly world-class business.