Fides, a Munich, Germany-based legal SaaS platform, wants to make it easier for companies like fintechs to avoid corporate governance mishaps — and save on lawyer costs, raised $4.3 million in a seed round.
La Famiglia led the round, with participation from Cristina Stenbeck (owner of Kinnevik and board member at Zalando and Spotify), Gesa Miczaika, and Bettine Schmitz from the Auxxo Female Catalyst Fund, Christa Davies (CFO of AON, board member at Stripe and Workday), and Katharina Jünger (founder of TeleClinic).
In three months, Fides plans to roll out to large enterprises with 50+ subsidiaries, which will be its core market in the future. It operates on a monthly fee-based business model, varying depending on how many entities a company has.
Part of the fresh capital will go towards the AI tool the company is developing to automate as many of these tasks as possible.
“What we discovered is that everything, especially around entity management and board management, is totally standardizable — it’s really based on laws and contracts that don’t change every day,” CEO and cofounder Lisa Gradow said. “But because it’s so dull for the lawyers, there’s a big capacity for human error. So we thought there should be a tool for it.”
Fides currently has a team of 16 — predominantly made up of engineers and lawyers — and plans to grow to around 40 in the next 12 months.
Company: Fides Technology GmbH
Raised: $4.3M
Round: Seed Round
Funding Month: October 2022
Lead Investors: La Famiglia
Additional Investors: Cristina Stenbeck, Gesa Miczaika, Bettine Schmitz, Christa Davies and Katharina Jünger
Company Website: https://www.fides.technology/
Software Category: Legal SaaS platform
About the Company: Founded in 2021 by Lisa Gradow, Phillippa Peters, and Vincent Bobinski, Fides is a web-based app designed for general counsels to digitize and manage their governance duties all in one place. Fides is the new way to manage your entity and board governance and turn your corporate duties into good governance. Fides store data like your bylaws, shareholder KYC info, register excerpts, committees and make that data actionable via features like an interactive org chart, searchable entities list, cap table, and a timeline of relevant activities across entities. Its software provides a compliant framework for executing and documenting governance-relevant decisions, including legal guidance through templates, next steps, and a catalog outlining decision requirements and timestamps for every action with an IP address. Around 20 European companies are using Fides, including the luxury watch retailer Chrono24, the Berlin software company Pitch, and the venture capital fund Headline. Fides has a team of 16—primarily engineers and lawyers.
Source: https://sifted.eu/articles/sequoia-accelerator-fides-seed/