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Augmetec raises £2M+ in seed funding
Augmetec, the legaltech startup founded and led by Kritin Sundaram, announces that it has raised over £2 million in seed funding to turbo charge its growth. The round is led by UK-based early-stage investors Fuel Ventures, with participation from Swiss fund 14Peaks Capital, and three industry angel investors, including the Founding Partner of one of the world’s largest law firms, the family office of a $1 billion+ legaltech organisation, and the Head of Fraud at Asia’s largest law firm.
Historically, ethics and compliance investigations are slow, expensive, and often inconsistent. With increased global enforcement action for regulatory non-compliance, particularly for regulations with extraterritorial reach, such as 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 extra 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 empowers organisations to standardise processes and investigative workflows, maintain trust, and increase transparency and auditability.
LEIAA’s user-friendly interface provides 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. It enables multinational corporations, top law firms, global financial services organisations, NGOs, and governments, to eliminate inefficiencies by leveraging these AI and automation-focused tools. This means they can make data-driven decisions, optimise 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 fresh injection of capital to continue growing its client base, to fund its product development and to level up its offering on a global scale. 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.
Kritin Sundaram, Co-Founder and CEO at Augmetec, said: “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.”
Oliver Hammond, Partner at Fuel Ventures, said: “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.”
Emanuele Larocca, Principal at 14Peaks Capital, said: “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.”
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