UK legaltech business Avvoka has secured a £14m investment to support the company’s US expansion plans.
The funding round was led by UK billionaire couple Mark and Lindy O’Hare via their private investment firm Valhalla Ventures. The husband and wife team previously founded financial data company Preqin, which they sold to BlackRock for £2.5bn last year.
The capital injection marks a significant financial boost for Avvoka, which had only previously received £600k from angel investors. Avvoka provides automated legal drafting tech to law firms and in-house legal departments.
Avvoka says the new capital will expand its platform’s capabilities for high-volume legal work following a record year of growth, with its technology being adopted by A&O Shearman and Ropes & Gray among other major global law firms, as well as multinational brands such as Warner Bros. Discovery.
David Howorth, co-founder of Avvoka, said: “This capital enables us to accelerate our US expansion and deepen the platform for high-volume, high-variation work while staying true to the principles that got us here: governance, control and respect for institutional knowledge.”
Mark O’Hare said that while AI is changing how legal work is completed, it will not “replace the need for robust systems”.
He added: “Avvoka’s attraction is their recognition that drafting is not a tool problem, it is an infrastructure problem. Firms that want to scale without diluting their expertise will need platforms built with that reality in mind.”
London-based Avvoka was launched in 2016 by Howorth and Eliot Benzecrit, who both began their careers at Magic Circle firms – Howorth as a trainee solicitor at Linklaters and Benzecrit as an associate at Slaughter and May.
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