London start-up clinches $1m to help businesses understand their legal obligations

Ever struggled to find regulatory information for your business or found it difficult to understand your business’ legal obligations?

A one year-old tech start-up, Libryo, has come up with a solution and has secured $1m from investors including Seedcamp, Innogy, Force over Mass, and Nextlaw Labs to roll it out.

The round marks the first investment for Innogy’s UK Innovation Hub and also saw angel investors Steve Gledden, ex-CEO of EML, and Chris Field, partner at a leading international law firm, participate.

With offices in London and Cape Town, Libryo’s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform seeks to enable anyone in any organisation globally to understand their legal obligations in any situation.

The business – which has customers in more than 50 countries – says understanding legal obligations has traditionally been a “manual and expensive” process performed by lawyers and consultants.

Using innovative technology, Libryo claims to have overcome this regulatory complexity. Its platform enables compliance professionals and in-house lawyers to answer the question of “what does the law require me to do, here and now?” immediately and accurately in an automated and cost effective manner.

Taking total investment to $1.2m, it will use this fresh funding to expand further across Africa, Europe, North America, and Australia within the next two years, with the ambition to reach £2.5m revenue.

To support these growth ambitions, the business – which boasts a Seal of Excellence from the EU Commission – intends to make strategic hires across product, operations and customer relations.

Peter Flynn, co-founder and CEO of Libryo, commented on the business’ journey so far:

“At Libryo we serve customers across many countries by providing certainty and comfort, through our process of providing the right regulatory information for them, at the right time.

“For lawyers, we’re helping to alleviate some of the legal research work, which their clients are often unwilling to pay for, so that they can focus on adding premium value to their clients in other areas. We’re already seeing a huge appetite for our service across Africa, particularly in the legal domains of environment and occupational health and safety, and are at a key moment for our business as we look to expand our offering even further across the world and into other legal domains.”

Seedcamp investment manager, Tom Wilson, added: “We’ve been really impressed with the Libryo team since our initial investment and are delighted to be following on in this round. We see a real demand in the market for their product as evidenced by their strong traction to date across a number of jurisdictions.”