Burnaby-based Clio (Themis Solutions Inc.) has scored what is likely the largest-ever venture-capital investment in a Canadian technology company: US$900 million.
New Enterprise Associates (NEA) led Clio’s Series F funding round, with participation from Goldman Sachs, Sixth Street, Tidemark and the venture-capital arm of Alphabet Inc. (Nasdaq:GOOG; GOOGL), known as CapitalG.
The capital raise values the privately held legal-technology developer at about US$3 billion, which Clio claims to be the most in the world for a cloud-based legal-technology company.
Clio’s previous market valuation was US$1.6 billion in April 2021, when it closed a US$110-million Series E funding round that came largely from funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates as well as capital from OMERS Growth Equity.
Its Series D funding round in 2019 captured US$250 million from TCV and JMI Equity. Clio’s Series C funding round, in 2014, was significantly smaller, at US$20 million, Clio CEO and co-founder Jack Newton told BIV.
“We're growing rapidly while growing profitably, which is a very desirable combination of factors for investors in the current market environment,” he said.
“We're going to continue building out the operating system for legal. We're the de-facto platform for legal today, and we're going to continue investing in that platform and innovating that platform for our customers.”
Newton said that rather than Clio seeking investment partners, it was the new investors that sought Clio out.
He pinned Clio’s current revenue run rate at US$200 million but would not disclose revenue figures for individual calendar years.
“We don’t disclose specific growth rates,” he said, before confirming that his company’s annual revenue increase last year was in the “double digits” percentage-wise.
An initial public offering (IPO) could be in the cards.
“We see an IPO as certainly an eventual chapter in Clio’s growth story that we will pursue if it makes sense both for the company and if the market conditions present themselves in a favourable way,” Newton said.
“There are a number of external factors that we are not in direct control of that could dictate whether an IPO is the right path for the company, or not, but we're investing in making sure that we have the foundations, the governance and the infrastructure in place for an eventual public listing.”
He said there is no specific timeline for that IPO but that it would be in “2025 or beyond.”
People involved in the venture-capital sector told BIV that landing US$900 million is an extraordinary feat.
Garibaldi Capital Advisors CEO Brent Holliday told BIV that in the aught years a capital raise in the tens of millions of dollars was significant.
Capital raises that were more than US$100 million started in the 2010s. B.C.’s Hootsuite raised US$165 million in 2013. BuildDirect.com Technologies Inc. (TSX-Venture:BILD) in that decade raised tens of millions of U.S. dollars in 2012 and 2014 before it went into creditor protection in 2017 and restructured, Holliday said.
Trulioo Information Services Inc. was another Vancouver technology company raising substantial venture capital in the twenty-tens. It raised US$70 million from a consortium of global banking firms in 2019 and then, in 2021, US$394 million from TCV among other investors.
“There were a bunch that were raising US$100 million, US$150 million, US$200-million rounds,” Holliday said.
When interest rates started to rise to be at multi-decade highs in 2022, funding became “very, very sparse,” he said.
The exception being fast-growing companies with revenues nearing US$100 million annually, he added.
“Those companies are being swarmed by investors,” he said.
Getting several hundred million U.S. dollars in venture capital, however, “would be absolutely exceptional.”
Getting US$900 million, by that gauge, is therefore simply off the charts for being impressive.
Founded in 2008, Clio helps law firms use technology to be more efficient, with software to help with billing, client intake, case management, document management and other tasks.
It started off mostly helping smaller law offices but is increasingly used by larger firms.
Its products help streamline interactions with courts and help lawyers e-file documents. Increasingly applications have integrated artificial intelligence (AI) into its products.
“The documents that lawyers generate are documents that are very amenable to being enhanced by AI,” Newton said.
Clio applications use AI to help lawyers respond to clients’ emails or text messages, and clients’ inquiries about the status of their cases, he said.
It has been dubbed as Salesforce (NYSE:CRM) for lawyers.
Clio’s funding from CapitalG does not come with strings attached or mean that the company must use Alphabet’s Gemini AI model, Newton said.
“There are certainly opportunities for us to partner with Google,” he said. “Those could include partnering on AI. It could involve partnering on cloud infrastructure. It could involve partnering on their advertising products.”
Newton said his 1,100-employee Clio is hiring at its Burnaby headquarters, which has about 400 workers.
Clio also has a 350-person office in Toronto. Its offices in Calgary and Dublin, Ireland, have about 100 workers each. It also has a 15-employee office in Sydney, Australia. Others work remotely or in the U.S.
