AI platform for automating legal due diligence gets support for international ambitions.
Belgian tech company Emma Legal has raised 1.6 million euros of capital from London-based fund 6 Degrees Capital & Belgian Entourage Capital.
Emma Legal is a young technology company focused on automating legal due diligence in Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A). A manual process that typically takes weeks, sometimes months, Emma Legal's platform converts it into an analysis of a few hours. 6 Degrees Capital and Entourage Capital are providing a funding round to further expand Emma Legal. Today, several law firms and consulting firms specialising in M&A in Belgium and Europe are using the first version of the platform.
Emma Legal's platform focuses on automating legal due diligence, a crucial and necessary step in mergers and acquisitions that involves thorough research into the legal aspects of a company or transaction. The analysis aims to identify potential risks and liabilities by analysing all contracts, intellectual property rights, pending litigation, compliance with laws and regulations, and other legal issues that may affect the value or feasibility of a proposed acquisition or investment. Emma Legal's advantage is that it can deliver this analysis faster, with a high degree of accuracy.
Emma Legal's founders are serial entrepreneurs Rick Van Esch and Pieter Buteneers. Together, they previously built out Chatlayer, a company focused on developing AI chatbots. Chatlayer was acquired by international tech player Sinch in March 2020.
“Emma Legal offers both companies and lawyers a powerful AI-based solution that can immediately save an enormous amount of time”, says Pieter Buteneers, Founding-CTO of Emma Legal. “Thanks to the recent evolutions in Large Language Models and certainly since the arrival of affordable models such as GPT 4, there is nothing technologically in the way anymore. When you combine this with relevant acquisition and investment expertise, it really makes a difference for our clients. The result is a platform that guarantees more certainty, more accuracy and consequently less risk, and that in a fraction of the time. Legal Due Diligence thus becomes less of an obstacle and that gives more time to work on the substance. It is precisely where the law firm can add the most value with its expertise.”
