Augmetec, the legal tech startup for internal and regulatory investigations has raised over £2 million in a seed funding round. The round was led by UK-based early-stage investors Fuel Ventures, with participation from Swiss fund 14Peaks Capital. Three industry angel investors also participated. These included the Founding Partner of one of the world’s largest law firms, the family office of a $1bn+ legal tech organisation and the Head of Fraud at Asia’s largest law firm.
The cost of ethics and compliance investigations is often huge. They are often conducted in a slow, inefficient and inconsistent way. Kritin Sundaram, Co-Founder and CEO of Augmetec, who conducted numerous investigations during his career at Filefisher and Herbert Smith Freehills, had a vision. He believed that through AI and advanced technologies, Augmetec would drive the legal and compliance industry forward across four pillars:
- The efficiency of investigations
- Cost optimisation
- Accuracy and precision
- Information security
The investors recognise the vision and opportunity. Oliver Hammond, Partner at Fuel Ventures, commented, “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.”
Augmetec is poised to make a real difference in investigations
Sunduram founded Augmetec in 2023 along with Jonathan Jackson – Co-Founder and Chief Scientific Officer. The team has built an end-to-end SaaS platform that provides a highly secure environment. This enables investigators to manage and conduct their investigations efficiently, consistently and comprehensively. LEIAA: Your Investigations Command Centre – is built by investigators for investigators. It empowers organisations to standardise processes and investigative workflows, maintain trust, and increase transparency and auditability.
Kritin Sundaram, Co-Founder and CEO at Augmetec, said, “Augmetec has been built on decades of experience in conducting hundreds of high-profile investigations into alleged improper conduct. Our fantastic team has deep industry expertise to create specific solutions to solve precise, real-world problems. This is the backbone of LEIAA’s offering, which has been directly experienced and loved by customers worldwide.
“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.”
Why Augmetec matters
The growing regulatory environment means that firms face increasing pressure to investigate claims of ethics violations and fraud. Regulations such as the UK Bribery Act and the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act have shown teeth over recent years. Under the UK Bribery Act, companies have been levied significant fines. With notable examples including Rolls-Royce PLC paying £671 million, Airbus SE facing a combined multi-jurisdictional penalty of US$3.9 billion, and Airline Services Limited being fined around £2.9 million for failing to prevent bribery.
Whistleblower regulations in the United States, the UK, and the EU have the consequence of increasing the chance of highlighting incidents and subsequent investigations. The additional work required by investigation teams risks a slow turnaround, which could lead to higher fines without further recruitment of outsourced costs for the investigation. LEIAA provides a platform that increases the efficiency of investigations, thus reducing risk and costs.
LEIAA helps investigations from start to finish. It helps investigation teams from inception with data analysis and witness interviews and helps generate the final reports. The platform is targeted at multinational corporations, top law firms, global financial services organisations, NGOs, and governments to administrate investigations.
Augmetec already has several customers. A Managing Partner at one top-ranked law firm commented, “The investigation management and document analytics features are game-changing. Cost savings and superior conduct detection will really help.”
Conscious of the sensitive nature of investigations the platform was built with security by design. LEIAA has ISO27001 and SOC II security certifications and meets HIPAA and GDPR requirements. It also supports integrations to other SaaS applications such as Relativity, iManage and NetDocuments and Cloud platforms such as Microsoft and Google.
Growing Augmetec
The funds will be used to drive global growth and fund R&D into the product. Augmetec already has employees based in the UK, Germany, Portugal, and the US. It currently has two open positions, both based in London, where it is headquartered. It is aiming to hire across engineering, compliance, operations, and sales. The investment will also help fuel new and strengthen existing international enterprise partnerships. It will also develop new features for and enhance existing ones in LEIAA.
Emanuele Larocca, Principal at 14Peaks Capital, commented, “LEIAA by Augmetec is uniquely positioned to truly automate regulatory investigation workflows. The team’s intimate understanding of investigative processes has been distilled into a fit-for-purpose software solution, leveraging a unified data architecture to consolidate siloed tasks into a cohesive, transparent, and secure platform.
“We are convinced that both enterprise and law firms worldwide will resonate with this proposition, finding Augmetec the ideal partner to navigate to the ever-evolving global regulatory landscape.”
Enterprise Times: What does this mean?
The total funding seems small for a firm that already seems to have some significant customers. It will be interesting to see how quickly the firm grows and how soon it looks to raise additional funds.
Interestingly, LEIAA already has a listing on GCloud 14. However, it is referenced under SafeHous Group Ltd, a reseller for Augmetec. This a startup with huge potential. The question is whether it can keep control of itself and grow or be swallowed up by another major player in the legal tech industry.
Augmetec has made an impressive start to its life. If it can start naming its customers and produce case studies that demonstrate the benefits it delivers, it could grow quickly.
