Each contract typically goes through a lifecycle that involves creation, negotiation, execution, and monitoring. Each of these steps involves various stakeholders that each may be responsible for review, editing, distribution, signing, storage, and renewal. Automating the workflow reduces the time spent by all parties involved and decreases the legal cost. Juro is an automated, end-to-end contract management and execution platform that allows all parties to manage all facets of the contract lifecycle from any web browser. By focusing on a browser-based solution, the contracting process is frictionless and centralized without requiring different organizations to rely on disparate software. The company has benefited from the rapid digital adoption acceleration as a result of the pandemic; Juro has processed 300K+ contracts since its founding in 2016 with 250K+ in 2021 alone.
London TechWatch caught up with Juro CEO Richard Mabey to learn more about how his work as a lawyer inspired the business, the company’s strategic plans, how this funding round came together, which brings the total funding raised for the six-year-old company to $31.5M, and much, much more.
Who were your investors and how much did you raise?
We raised a $23.25M Series B round, led by Eight Roads. Also participating were existing investors Union Square Ventures, Point Nine Capital, Seedcamp, and Wise cofounder Taavet Hinrikus.
Tell us about your product or service.
Juro is the all-in-one contract automation platform that helps visionary legal counsel and the teams they enable to agree and manage contracts in one unified workspace. Juro powers more than 300,000 contracts in more than 80 countries, with a customer base that includes Trustpilot, Deliveroo, and Cazoo.
What inspired the start of Juro?
I was a lawyer at a Magic Circle firm in the City, and I experienced first-hand quite how painful contracts – and contract process – can be. So much time was sunk into manual, administrative work just to get routine contracts agreed, often at the expense of the in-house legal team, and it seemed clear that there was an enormous amount of pain to try and solve.
How is it different?
Although there are other contract platforms out there, Juro is the only platform that truly enables you to process contracts end-to-end with one solution. It does this via a browser-native flexible template editor and data model which can be set up in minutes. For this reason, we are the #1 rated contracting platform for ease of use.
What market you are targeting and how big is it?
Juro works best for companies needing to create and process high volumes of contracts, working with several teams within a business. For this reason, we work primarily with the legal teams at high-growth tech companies – they see contract volumes increase every month, and contract automation can help them to keep pace without having to hire dozens of lawyers. We work with around 25 ‘unicorn’ tech companies in this space.
Beyond that, the addressable market is any business dealing with contracts – which is a lot of businesses. We have customers in all sorts of verticals, from large accountancy firms and media companies, to the UK’s biggest newspaper group, and all kinds of SMEs. Anyone who has to process contracts at scale will have felt this pain, and that’s who we’re here to help.
What’s your business model?
Juro offers a subscription model, whereby companies pay based on the number of users that need access to the product, as well as the number of contracts they might need to manage. We have flexible plans for any business, ranging from a small deployment to a bespoke plan for enterprise implementations.
What are your post-COVID office plans?
The company operates a London hub, a hub in the Baltics, and a fully remote hub. Post-COVID, this will remain the same, but we’ll be moving soon to a bigger space in central London to keep pace with our headcount growth.
What was the funding process like?
We were fortunate to be working with some world-class investors already, like Union Square Ventures and Point Nine Capital, which certainly helped with meeting prospective investors. Equally a number of our customers had recommended to their investors that they should take a look at Juro. Harder than actually meeting investors was identifying which investors were a good fit, in terms of their sector expertise, global reach and actually just whether we wanted to work with them. In the end we had multiple offers and went with the firm that we thought would be the best partner for us.
We were fortunate to be working with some world-class investors already, like Union Square Ventures and Point Nine Capital, which certainly helped with meeting prospective investors. Equally a number of our customers had recommended to their investors that they should take a look at Juro. Harder than actually meeting investors was identifying which investors were a good fit, in terms of their sector expertise, global reach and actually just whether we wanted to work with them. In the end we had multiple offers and went with the firm that we thought would be the best partner for us.
What are the biggest challenges that you faced while raising capital?
Grappling fundraising processes while running the company is hard, but you can really help yourself out by being hyper-organized. No one has time really for random coffees, so instead, qualify your leads and focus on the small group of good-fit investors. Equally, get started on the front foot by having a data room ready. We ran the process from first meeting to money in the bank in 9 weeks.
What factors about your business led your investors to write the check?
Eight Roads believed in our vision for browser-based contracting. It’s clear to anyone that’s used the combination of Word, email, and DocuSign to agree contracts that it’s a clunky experience that doesn’t scale, and our plan to tackle that was compelling.
In addition, we have a great set of customer logos already, including several of the Eight Roads portfolio, like Funnel, Cazoo, and Mention Me, which was great validation of what we can do.
What are the milestones you plan to achieve in the next six months?
Our main short and medium focuses are to:
- continue to develop our product
- built out our executive team, and
- scale our go-to-market engine to keep our growth momentum.
What advice can you offer companies in London that do not have a fresh injection of capital in the bank?
It’s important to remember that capital is not the be-all and end-all. Sometimes I see founders who see funding as the goal, but it’s just fuel in the tank – the goal is to build a great product and distribute it widely. If you focus on that and see funding as secondary, ironically you are more likely to attract the right investors. I’m awestruck by founders that manage to bootstrap – if you can make this work, it’s the dream.
Where do you see the company going now over the near term?
In headcount terms, we’re aiming to grow from 50ish to around 130 during 2022. So, lots of hiring!
What is your favourite restaurant in London?
I am obsessed with Japanese food, so I’d say Akira at the Japan House.
