Vancouver-based startup Minutebook is seeking to disrupt the legal industry by streamlining corporate records management, equity ownership, and legal agreements with a first-of-its-kind digital platform.
And the fledging fintech unveiled this week that it has raised $3.5 million in an oversubscribed seed funding round to do just that.
“I am thrilled to announce the public launch of Minutebook Technologies Corporation, Minutebook.com, and the close of our oversubscribed $3.5M seed financing,” stated chief executive officer Ryan Wilson.
Minutebook’s digital platform aims to free legal professionals from tedious, error-prone data management tasks, allowing them to focus on providing expert advice to their clients.
The platform’s objective, according to a recent statement, is “to equip legal professionals, their clients, and their client’s stakeholders with a world-class digital collaboration and automation platform for equity ownership, corporate records, and legal agreements.”
The seed funding round included investments from industry-leading venture capitalists, partners from top Canadian law firms, successful entrepreneurs, and private equity investors. Notable investors include Rian Gauvreau, co-founder of Clio; Paul Geyer, CEO of Nimbus Synergies; Jason Robertson, co-founder of Nimbus; and Red Thread Ventures.
This capital injection will be used to execute the company’s go-to-market strategy, expand its customer base, and hire top talent in sales, customer success, product management, and engineering.
“As a founder and investor, I have gravitated towards finding opportunities to transform industries using snail mail, spreadsheets, email and the fax machines,” said Wilson. “Along this journey, I discovered the incredible power of employee ownership and always wished there was a better tool to engage my team on their employee stock and stock option ownership.”
While raising capital from investors, Wilson “always felt the process of private company investing was needlessly manual and should be as easy as buying a pair of sneakers on Shopify.”
“When investing in funds and private companies,” he recalls, “I always hated going to the bank to send wires and filling out the same information on accredited investor paperwork.”
When it was time to sell his companies, during the due diligence process Wilson learned the meaning behind “time kills deals.”
“I was frustrated with the number of places corporate records tend to live in the modern enterprise,” he says. “Finally, when engaging with my lawyer, the lack of a single source of truth and self-serve access to our documents seemed strange in this era of online banking and self-serve everything.”
Founded in 2022, Minutebook spent its first year building the platform and soliciting feedback from prospective customers and early adopters. The product was utilized to automate the company’s seed funding round.
The procedure, which included automating the collection and compilation of subscription information and executing those documents with integrated funding from investors’ bank accounts, achieved a 95% reduction in labour from their executive team and law firm, according to data from Minutebook.
The startup’s platform offers various benefits for both companies and law firms. Companies can maximize the value of their Employee Stock Ownership Plans by increasing visibility to employees, close financing rounds faster, and prepare for M&A or financing with document generation and consent management. Law firms can provide a digital experience for their clients and frictionlessly onboard new clients in under five minutes.
Minutebook also prioritizes security, as demonstrated by their work towards a SOC 2 Type II attestation. Their security protocols cover governance, data protection, product security, enterprise security, vendor security, secure remote access, security education, and identity and access management.
With its recent funding and clear focus on innovation and security, Minutebook is poised to make a significant impact on the legal industry. The company is currently looking for early-adopter law firms and lawyers who are eager to deliver a premier digital experience to their clients.
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