We’re on a mission to revolutionize the legal industry with a digital platform that streamlines equity ownership, corporate records and legal agreements, so legal professionals and clients can focus on what really matters.
At Walter, we are building the first-of-its-kind legal, financial and people technology platform to eliminate the manual, human-powered and error-prone movement of ownership data between many siloed information systems. Call it cap table software, call it legal technology, call it fintech – whatever you call it, our objective is to eliminate manual data entry and free up lawyers and their clients to focus on the highest value activities.
Our mission is to equip legal professionals, their clients and their client’s stakeholders with a world-class digital collaboration and automation platform for equity ownership, corporate records and legal agreements.
Our vision is a future where company builders, their stakeholders and trusted advisors can focus their resources on the stuff that matters – automating away the transactional elements of corporate governance, record keeping and equity ownership.
We are building the software every corporate law firm, lawyer and paralegal wishes existed. Software that is a delight to use, doesn't get in the way of the client relationship and enables your team to focus on the highest value activities for your clients.
We have brought together leading founders, investors and lawyers to envision the future of company-building technology and to build a platform at the intersection of legal, financial and people technology. This is the first corporate records management solution built with the law firm in mind. We believe lawyers should be able to focus on providing expert legal advice, not pushing paper around and herding cats.
Today, we are excited to announce that we’ve raised an oversubscribed $3.5M seed round, with investments from leading venture capitalists, partners at Canada’s top law firms, exited founders and private equity investors. Among our investors are Clio Co-founder Rian Gauvreau, Nimbus Synergies CEO Paul Geyer, Nimbus Synergies Co-Founder & Partner Jason Robertson and Red Thread Ventures.
This is a big milestone for our team and we wanted to share a bit about why we’re tackling this problem, our progress so far and what we’re planning next.
Why this is important
Legal fees should be for expertise, not paper-pushing: The best lawyers and law firms want to focus their resources on offering high-value legal expertise for their clients, not the manual shuffling of documents and data between siloed information systems via people and emails. By automating low-value transactional tasks, clients can focus more of their legal spend on great legal expertise from their trusted advisors.
Important company records are scattered, inaccurate and incomplete: Data and documents related to equity transactions in private companies are scattered amongst professionals and their clients, email accounts, e-signature solutions and other siloed information systems. Professional firms, their clients and their clients’ investor and employee stakeholders need a single source of truth for these important records.
The trend toward private investing: We’re seeing a significant flow of capital from public to private markets and this segment of ownership deserves the same tooling as the public markets.
Employee ownership is the way of the future: Employee ownership pushes profits and investment opportunities back into the population, increases accountability of companies to their employee owners and increases transparency that creates trust with employees and customers. A modern toolchain is needed to bring transparency to employee ownership and increase the accessibility of employee ownership through the automation of the administration of employee ownership programs.
Critical need for cap tables to become more diverse: Lowering transaction costs associated with participation in private venture capital investing offers founders the opportunity to increase the diversity of their investor base in support of our belief that diverse investors will result in more diverse founders and businesses.
Fund transfers are a pain for everyone: Collecting funds from investors is still an antiquated process requiring investors to call or visit their bank. With decades of financial technology experience amongst our founding team, we have built automated, secure and integrated payment-processing capabilities into our legal technology platform, driving efficiency and transaction security while satisfying Investor Accreditation, Know Your Customer and Anti-Money Laundering regulations for companies raising capital and disbursing proceeds.
What we’ve been up to so far
After getting started in early 2022, we spent the following year talking to prospective customers and quietly building out the first version of the product. We brought on a few early adopter users and received incredibly positive feedback.
Then, we were ready to onboard our first customer for their financing: Walter! We raised this seed round using Walter's technology, automating the collection of subscription information, the compilation of subscription information into documents provided by our law firm, the execution of those documents with our partner DocuSign and integrated and automated funding from our investors’ bank accounts - no trips to the bank or wire transfers required. This achieved a 95% reduction in labour from our executive team and law firm to complete the transaction.
Some of our feedback from investors:
"Very smooth, very slick. Fastest I’ve ever spent that amount online or in person."
“I love how it keeps all the documents related to my private investments in one spot.”
Given our own success using the product, we started sharing what we’ve been up to with our immediate network. We were happy to see how much our vision has resonated with law firms and companies alike and found ourselves managing a strong (and growing) inbound pipeline even before launch!
We’ve started onboarding early adopters and the excitement we’re seeing in demos and onboarding calls is really special. Every customer has found value in the platform identifying gaps in their data.
What’s next
We’ll use the proceeds from this financing to execute on our go-to-market strategy to grow our customer base, which already includes pharmaceutical companies, private equity investment firms and companies of all sizes, from early-stage startups to Series B. To do that, we’re hiring top sales, customer success, product management and engineering talent to attract, onboard and retain early adopters and to keep us laser-focused on providing a world-class onboarding and product experience for our customers.
We are so excited to announce that we are open for business!
We’re looking for early-adopter law firms and lawyers who want to deliver a first-class digital experience for their clients.
If you’re a lawyer and innovator who likes to be ahead of the curve, join us! Reach out at sales@getwalter.com.
We’re so excited to be on this journey with you.
— Ryan & the Walter team