46. Lexoo

Founders: Daniel van Binsbergen and Chris O’Sullivan
Founded: February 2014
Website: www.lexoo.co.uk

Frequently asked by friends whether they were being charged a fair price for legal advice, international lawyer Daniel van Binsbergen saw an opportunity to introduce some transparency to the market.

Alongside web expert and co-founder Chris O-Sullivan, he launched Startups 100 2015-featured Lexoo, an online service that helps businesses get fixed fee quotes from specialist lawyers within 24 hours. Our second law-focused entry on this year’s list, the start-up puts lawyers in direct competition with each other,  and claims that by doing so it encourages them to give their best price upfront. Lexoo doesn’t just use any lawyers, it specialises in finding those who’ve trained at larger firms but now work at, or have started, a smaller firm and are able to offer the same expertise at “half the rate”. To date, around 6,000 businesses, mostly start-ups, have benefited from the service (a growth of 5,000 new customers on last year), but larger firms have also used it to complement their own in-house lawyers.

Free-to-use, the service charges the lawyers a marketing fee upon payment by the client. Having raised £1.1m to date, most recently with a $1.3m funding round led by Forward Partners, Lexoo is preparing for a Series A in the Autumn to consolidate its UK market position before taking on Europe with its first launch on the continent.