Lawhive raised $60m Series B: Pierre Proner, Co-founder and CEO at Lawhive

0:00Pierre Proner:Hello and welcome to the Scaling Europe show presented by Deal. This episode is sponsored by SurrealDB, the multimodal database for AI agents. Omni, the AI analytics platform trusted by growing companies like Perplexity and Symbesia and VentureComet, the platform that gives startups and scale-ups real-time equity tracking, daily business insights and automated management information. Thank you for joining me. Please like, comment and subscribe.

0:33Pierre Proner:Hello and welcome back to the Scaling Europe show. I'm Seb Johnson. Today I've got a great guest, Pierre, one of the co-founders of LawHive. LawHive is a very exciting legal AI company being built out here in the UK. Just raised a very sizable$60 million Series B. So, Pierre, thank you for joining me. How are you doing today? Thanks for having me on, Seb. It's great to be here. Doing great. So tell me about the round then. You raised$60 million. Who came on board and I guess what gave them the conviction to back you? yes this was our our series b um which we raised uh tail end of last year we just announced it um and it was done just slightly under a year from the series a um so the the the company had grown quite significantly from a to b at 7x revenue growth um significant headcount growth we'd launched actually into the u.s market um between the a and b about midway through last year So quite a bit had happened over 2025.

1:25And we thought it was time to bring in some fresh capital, even though we were sitting on the vast majority of the capital that we'd already raised the previous round. The company is quite capital efficient. But we thought it was the right time, primarily just around the U.S. expansion focus that we have for 2026 and bringing in the right U.S.-based investors to help support that ambition. objective. So the B was led, in the end, we had a whole bunch of term sheets for the B, which we were very fortunate to have. The one that we chose to lead the round was Mitch Rails, which is actually, Mitch is a founder, not a venture capital investor originally, although he now is making venture investments.

2:13But he comes from this incredible background. He was kind of like the goat of building an acquisition-led business. Danaher is a business that he built with his brother. Founded that business and brought it to a multiple$100 billion valuation, publicly listed company. And he himself now is looking to strategically invest in just a very small handful of startups where he thinks that he can deliver value that goes beyond just the pure capital. For us, that was really the driver. So Mitch led the round. He's joined our board, and he's going to be supporting us as we think through U.S. market expansion over the next 12 months and beyond.

3:00We're also lucky that existing investors, TQ out of New York, who are a phenomenal boutique fund um who are extraordinarily founder supportive founder led fund led by schuster and andrew they uh they co-led the the the series a and they they actually went super rata on the b um we've been working really closely with them you know between the between the rounds getting to know them and and them obviously getting to know what we as a team are doing and beyond the fundraising cycle, where it's always a relatively rapid period to get to know each other. So I think they and we felt really, really strongly about deepening the relationship, which has been phenomenal.

3:45And then Google Ventures, who've been on since the seed, led our seed round. So they also invested to ProRotter again at this round. And finally, Balderton, who are an incredible European, UK-based fund, and Rob Moffat, their partner at Balderton. And then Vidu, who's on our board from Google Ventures, who's now general partner of Google Ventures, had been so deeply supported by him, by the GB team. So we're really, really fortunate at each of these rounds from Seed, Series A, Series B. We've been able to pick the investors that we are aligned with and that we want to work with. so we've been able to sort of amass this uh incredible set of investors who um who believe as strongly in you know as we do in what we're building amazing that there's lots to unpack

4:36Pierre Proner:one of the things that you mentioned is that you grew 7x last year and lots of companies talk about like uh 10x 50x growth whatever it is often those are from quite low bases so that it's you know it's quite easy to grow 20x on 200k of revenue you actually finished last year on 35 million of revenue right so it wasn't correct you didn't you didn't 7x from a very low base that was like a sizable base to begin with that you then 7x how much of that came from the u.s uh so the u.s we only launched into the u.s uh sort of mid mid way through last year it became our fastest growing market immediately so there was immediate market pull market traction in the in the u.s um which we weren't surprised by we'd spent quite a long time about 12 months of laying the groundwork for that, opening an office in Austin, Texas.

5:20We have now just opened an office in New York City as well as our second US office, building out a team, bringing in world-class talent, including one of the very earliest employees at a company called LegalZoom, which is sort of like the OG, the first wave of legal tech innovation way back in the day. That guy, James, is our MD for North America, has been working with us for quite a while, even pre-market entry, in order to build out what we were going to do there. So we knew the market well. I myself am a dual citizen. I'm born to American parents in London. So I lived, went to university in the US at Princeton, and I graduated, moved to New York City and lived in New York for 10 years, about 15 years in the US living and working there, starting my first business there.

6:06So I knew that well, and we had a strong plan already in place mapped out. But I think even we were surprised by the immediate traction and rate of growth in the US, which is why we're leaning so heavily into the US in 2026.

6:22Pierre Proner:And that makes sense. And you mentioned getting Mitch on board, who is an amazing entrepreneur, business person, but specifically on the acquisitions, right he's an amazing uh reputation track record for that kind of growth strategy you as a firm you made your own acquisition last year um is that going to be part of a broader strategy are you going to look to acquire more firms as you expand across the u.s yeah so we've acquired two law firms regulated law firms so far in addition to the one regulated firm that we started so we started our own regulated firm in the uk in in 2022 which was authorized in 23 early 23 that firm we then added a second UK firm called Woodstock Legal Services down on the south coast of the UK which is a really strong firm that's been going for over a decade so has an incredible brand and reputation both locally regionally also increasingly nationally particularly we hope to grow that national brand recognition with with our support and then we acquired a firm a regulated firm in the state of Arizona in the US as part of our US go-to-market strategy.

7:35And that firm is our regulated firm in Arizona from which we operate across now 35 states through, what's called a co-council model, which allows us to operate in states beyond Arizona.

7:46Pierre Proner:And maybe it's worth now talking about, you know, because legal AI tech is really hot at the moment. We're seeing huge rounds from the like of Lagora and Harvey, valued in the billions, raising hundreds of millions but it's a very different proposition to what you and your team at law hive are building and you're targeting a very different segment of the market and you're also as you mentioned you're like you're a law firm right so you are a very different proposition can you for those who don't know can you talk about how you're different who you're targeting that's different and how your technology is different to say the lagoras and the harvies of the world yeah of course there's sort of three three reasons so first being um we're focused very much on the consumer end of the market.

8:27So this is the way that regular people, you and I, would access the law and our legal rights in our communities and society. That's different from, say, a lot of the vast majority of the pure play sort of legal AI software vendors, providers, where they're selling software to big law, typically, corporate, commercial, in-house where a lot of that work is on the contracting, contract drafting, review, things like M &A, commercial disputes and so forth. We're focused on regular people and the way that they access the law and their legal rights in areas like family law, property, consumer dispute, civil litigation, estate planning, drafting a will, all of the things that as a regular person you think about and you need in your life, where many people do have access, albeit it's opaque, it's difficult to navigate, and many others, many more in fact, have no access at all, which is why we're particularly excited about the consumer end of the market, where you see a huge unmet need, less of the corporate commercial end.

9:36It's a different ballgame.

9:38Pierre Proner:And it's a huge market. I mean, we're talking about hundreds of billions, right? about a$200 billion market in the US, a$35 billion market in the UK. And then, you know, as I say, we're excited as well about this sort of latent demand, unmet needs, about a trillion dollars of estimated unmet need in the US, for instance, estimated by the American Bar Association of people who have serious legal problems every year who can't afford and can't access any kind of legal health kind of can't afford an attorney. And are you seeing specific use cases among that consumer demograph have stronger, you know, stronger pulls towards certain use cases that you're seeing already?

10:25We do. I mean, it's primarily people who, for whom accessing the law has historically been opaque, confusing, difficult to navigate. Maybe they, in some cases, would have been able to afford a local main street or high street law firm attorney. But when they find Law Hive, it's a transformative experience for them to be able to get access to the law in a much more straightforward way. So there's that. And about 35 % of the consumers who use Law Hive tell us that had they not found us, they would not have been able to afford legal help at all. Obviously, that's incredibly exciting. We want that figure to go up over time, not because we're not serving people who could afford an attorney, but because we can sell even more of the population who would otherwise not be able to.

11:21Pierre Proner:Yeah, it must be an amazing feeling being able to help people who otherwise wouldn't have been able to have been helped. Why do you think legal services in the legal sector has been one of the first areas where AI has been able to provide so much value compared to, say, other professional services like accountancy where we're starting to see things, but it's still very early. I think it's one of the core use cases, right, of these foundation models that we're seeing getting better and better, you know, by the week. Language tasks, language in, language out, where you're reviewing, you know, volumes of information, written information, you're having to analyze that information, summarize it.

11:59You're having to then draft documents forms um you know some of the early use cases at the software corporate end were things like tabular document review where you you can answer you know ask questions on a large volume of document for us we're really focused on how you can embed ai natively into not just the legal workflows of lawyers and paralegals and associates within a law firm But also the admin staff, non-legal staff who support those lawyers and that represent a very significant portion of the operational overhead and the cost base of running and operating a law firm. if you can help automate all of that work throughout the life cycle, right through from originating the client, intake, assessing that client's case, understanding whether you can help the merits of the legal merits of that case, right through to the actual doing of the legal work, automating forms, drafting, communication back and forth with the client and third parties, and so on.

13:04And then, as I say, all the back office stuff, payments, legal cashiering, client money reconciliation. And you can maintain a level of human supervision and oversight over the work of those AI agents, because of course, we're in a regulated environment and we ourselves are a regulated firm, a global AI native regulated law firm. And so maintaining compliance and supervision, which is sort of the less glamorous ends of say, delivering law, really critical um in in this space i think language models from 2020 when we when we when we started and and midway through 2020 gp2.3 you know came out it was clear to us that this was the direction of travel of the industry and and for our business and let's go back in time because i think it's really

13:49Pierre Proner:interesting that you are one of the you know one of the most successful ai companies around there's very few like you that was founded before the gpt moment you know end of 2022 2023 and so it's interesting to and there's a few founders that i've spoken to in different ai companies that have been doing this since before then and it's always interesting to hear their story about why they thought this was going to work at a time when the technology perhaps wasn't quite there yet so what was your what were your beliefs what convictions did you have back then that you know a legal ai firm like yourselves could work yeah the three founders myself jamie We'd worked together before in machine learning as a domain in data science.

14:31So I think we knew the potential of this technology, of which large language models is really the sort of theological next step of the evolution of these technologies within data science. I think 2019, when we got together, and then early 2020, pre-GPT3 through the API being available, we were working with NLP. So we had the same core thesis that if we could automate and reduce time spent for both lawyers on routine, repetitive legal tasks, but also non-billable administrative admin tasks that happen in the back office of a law firm constituting 60-70 % of the cost base of running a firm. If we could do that, then we could have a transformative impact on the operating model of high street, main street law.

15:20That was the ambition. It's just that the technology stack has evolved and it went from early 2020 NLP to very rapidly leaning entirely as a team into transform model LLMs. And we haven't looked back since then. So I think the thesis was there from the beginning, from inception. Maybe we got lucky. maybe we sort of believed at the time fundamentally which we did that the technology would evolve very rapidly and that would sort of lift all boats and and that this would be a very exciting time to

15:50Pierre Proner:build in this space and how did that thesis or that conviction go down with the the earliest investors that you spoke to they were skeptical at first you know this this was this was 2021 when we went out for our first institutional round uh post a sort of um you know early angel round that we'd raised prior to that. So our pre-seed round, I spoke to at least 100 plus investors, most of whom sort of raised an eyebrow, scratched their heads, you want to build an AI operating system for consumer law? That doesn't make any sense, right? So at the time, we really relied on investors who were effectively as visionary as we were around the direction of travel.

16:37that ended up being in the precede round um a VC fund called episode one ventures uh in the UK and that round was led by Hector Mason uh who actually was his first deal as a partner was the first deal that he that he that he led on um and supported by uh you know one of the OG partners of that firm Simon Murdoch and it was Simon Hector I spoke to the two of them at the same time the first call and they just got it immediately they got the idea they got the vision they were still skeptical because this was you know after all right after gp3 had come out no one really knew where this was where this technology would go uh so there was still the raised eyebrow that i saw in every other call but i think that raised eyebrow sort of dropped at some point and and the light bulb went on for both of them quite quickly um and had it not really been for episode one, maybe we wouldn't be here talking today.

17:32They certainly were the earliest venture backers and believers in what we're doing.

17:38Pierre Proner:Amazing. And what kind of partners have they been since? Phenomenal. I think pre-seed investors have a really essential role to play and place in this European ecosystem and global ecosystem, which is they are high conviction, faith-based investors. They have to believe really fundamentally in the founders and not necessarily in the exact strategy or tactics of what the founders are laying out because that iterates, that changes over time. So I think episode one do a phenomenal job of being that kind of conviction-based, almost faith-based investor, but still make good bets, right? because that's important too if you want to stick around as a venture fund.

18:28So I rate them very, very highly. They've been incredibly supportive. Hector was the first investor board member on our board. And at a time when we were still figuring stuff out, we went from software provider early on, building an AI operating system to sell to and partner with law firms to then becoming the law firm. and he was there for that entire transition journey.

18:53Pierre Proner:Amazing. I'm a big fan of his. I think he's a great investor and a good guy. We haven't got much time. To finish up, I want to talk about 2026. So you've got big targets, big ambitions for the rest of the year. I think I saw that you want to grow another 5 to 7x. We're now a couple of months through the year. How's it going so far? It's going really well. We've had a strong start of the year. I think we are in a good position to hit those goals in 2026. A lot of our focus, as you alluded to earlier, is on the US market, where we are relatively new there, just been in market since midway through last year.

19:31The UK remains a key market for us. It's an incredible test bed for innovation within this space. It's a very progressive and forward-thinking regulator, regulatory regime with the SRA. We have two regulated firms in the UK under the SRA regime. It's also our HQ in London off of Old Street Roundabout, Silicon Roundabout there. And we've opened a second HQ, so kind of split across New York and London now in terms of our headquarter focus. So, yeah, we're incredibly excited as a team about what 2026 and beyond has in store.

20:12Pierre Proner:Amazing. Well, thank you so much for joining me, Pia. I'm going to be following your journey and rooting for you. I think what you're building is really cool. And I think you've got a huge, huge opportunity. I think you're building something really cool in an absolutely massive market. So best of luck with it. Thanks so much, Seb. Thanks for having me on.

20:35Thank you.