Legaltech startup Athennian has acquired Montreal-based tax visualization startup Redox Technologies.
The acquisition, the first for Athennian, followed shortly after the Calgary-based startup closed a $8 million Series A this year. The deal is another step towards Athennian achieving its goal of becoming the leader in the legal entity management market.
“Legal is really going through its digital transformation moment right now.”
Having built a software platform geared towards helping law firms manage legal entities, and recently coming out of what it called “stealth mode,” Athennian now has its sights set on becoming a one-stop-shop for companies’ legal department needs.
The takeover of Redox is an acqui-hire for Athennian, with Redox’s founders Max Lussier and Nic Saudrais joining Athennian’s engineering team. Athennian stated that the deal will provide it with improved capabilities around the visualization of complex corporate ownership and tax structures.
“We have our own capabilities for that, but the Redox team [had] really taken that a step further and built some really compelling technology,” said Adrian Camara, co-founder and CEO of Athennian. “For that technology to visualize, it needs data, and [Athennian has] all the data. So, it was a good marriage of the two products and the two teams.”
Camara declined to share the purchase price of the deal, noting only that it was less than $1 million.
The Redox deal is part of a broader play by Athennian to win what Camara called the race to become “the Salesforce of legal.”
“In the legal world, right now, everybody is trying to build … the Salesforce equivalent for the legal department,” the Athennian CEO said.
“Legal is really going through its digital transformation moment right now. And there’s an opportunity for one big platform that corporate legal departments [use to] centralize their data,” he stated. “We take the view that legal entity management because these companies are really the structure, the legal structure that everything revolves around, that Athennian is best placed to become the Salesforce of legal.”
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While Athennian acquired Redox’s team to bolster its own tech, it is also looking to work with other companies by becoming a distribution channel for them.
Camara noted that Athennian has seen a lot of inbound interest from other legaltech companies looking to integrate with Athennian’s cloud-based software, which collects data on everything from compliance and ownership to digital signatures.
“Companies that … have innovative digital products for legal departments and law firms … come to us and they say, ‘listen our product would be 10X better for our customers if they could leverage the data that is already inside of Athennian,’” he stated. “[Athennian is] now at the point where we have so many customers at scale that we’re becoming a distribution channel for these products.”
To that end, Athennian is set to launch an open API and app store next year. In addition to providing legal departments with its own tech, the app store will allow for easy integrations of other tools needed to perform everyday legal functions.
With a global customer base, Athennian is already in talks regarding its app store with companies like United Kingdom-based software startup Jigsaw.
“What our team and our investors are really excited about with Athennian,” Camara stated. “Is that we are the central source, or the single source of truth, for very fundamental data that is really needed to execute a whole spectrum of downstream workflows.”
Image source Athennian
