Augmetec, a legal tech startup founded and led by Kritin Sundaram, announced that it has raised over £2 million in seed funding. The funding round is led by UK-based early-stage investors Fuel Ventures, with participation from Swiss fund 14Peaks Capital, and three industry angel investors, such as the Founding Partner of one of the world’s largest law firms, the family office of over $1 billion legal tech organizations, and the Head of Fraud at Asia’s largest law firm.
Ethics and compliance investigations are slow, often expensive, and inconsistent. And with increased global enforcement action for regulatory non-compliance, especially for regulations with extraterritorial reach like the UK Bribery Act and the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (reflected in penalties levied of over $375 billion since the 2007-2008 financial crisis), combined with the introduction of new whistleblower regulations, and a growing corporate speak up culture, the number of international and regulatory investigations is set to rise exponentially. This increased scrutiny and additional requirements not only cost corporations significant time and money, but also place a great strain on valuable resources. This is where Augmetec comes in.
The company’s platform, LEIAA: Your Investigations Command Centre, is built by investigators for investigators and it empowers organisations to standardise processes and investigative workflows, maintain trust, and increase transparency and auditability.
LEIAA’s user-friendly interface offers the necessary tools to manage and conduct entire end-to-end investigations, from inception to reporting, data analysis to witness interviews, and everything in between. And it enables multinational corporations, top law firms, global financial services organizations, NGOs, and governments, to eliminate inefficiencies by leveraging these AI and automation-focused tools. This means they can make data-driven decisions, optimize cost, alleviate the strain on valuable resources, and increase precision. With ISO27001 and SOC II security certifications, relevant integrations, and technology partner relationships with a host of enterprise platforms including the likes of Relativity, iManage and NetDocuments, LEIAA provides a secure, defensible, single source of truth.
Augmetec will use the new funding to continue growing its client base, to fund its product development and to level up its offering on a global scale. And the company has structured plans to expand its team by hiring key personnel in engineering, compliance, operations, and sales. Augmetec also aims to strengthen its international enterprise partnerships and invest in developing new features and enhancements for the LEIAA platform.
KEY QUOTES:
“Augmetec has been built on decades of experience in conducting hundreds of high-profile investigations into alleged improper conduct. Our fantastic team has deep industry expertise to create specific solutions to solve precise, real-world problems. This is the backbone of LEIAA’s offering, which has been directly experienced and loved by customers worldwide.”
“Our vision is to ease the overwhelming burden placed on the shoulders of investigative teams handling numerous, often complex, and multi-faceted investigations, which frequently involve multiple stakeholders across jurisdictions. With the growing number of global investigations, we believe we have built Augmetec at the perfect time to meet this ever-evolving need given the wider international regulatory landscape.”
- Kritin Sundaram, Co-Founder and CEO at Augmetec
“We’re so excited to be working with Augmetec. We’ve seen internal investigations within corporations increase significantly as regulation grows and levels of improper conduct increase. As such, corporations are being required to investigate thoroughly and fairly.”
“Progress in AI and automation means we think the time is now to automate and maximise the efficiency to a significant degree in that process, allowing corporations to come to conclusions quicker and more accurately. We think Augmetec is going to revolutionise this industry.”
- Oliver Hammond, Partner at Fuel Ventures
“LEIAA by Augmetec is uniquely positioned to truly automate regulatory investigation workflows. The team’s intimate understanding of investigative processes has been distilled into a fit-for-purpose software solution, leveraging a unified data architecture to consolidate siloed tasks into a cohesive, transparent, and secure platform.”
“We are convinced that both enterprise and law firms worldwide will resonate with this proposition, finding in Augmetec the ideal partner to navigate to the ever-evolving global regulatory landscape.”
• ⁃ Emanuele Larocca, Principal at 14Peaks Capital
