This content was created by Max Brun. This content was uploaded by Max Brun. This is a YouTube clip titled "The Fundraising Journey For Lawtrades (Ashish Chat Clip)" (uploaded January 30, 2022) containing an English interview-style conversation between two speakers (labeled SPEAKER A and SPEAKER B, with the metadata indicating Ashish/Lawtrades). The discussion focuses on Lawtrades' fundraising experience—moving from an earlier seed to a Series A—covering timing (started around November), financing tools used (Capchase), non-traditional fundraising channels (Stonks demo day, AngelList roll-up vehicle and syndicates), the use of Journey for investor materials, engaging customers and founders as investors (60–80 people via the roll-up), and finding a lead investor (named Louis/Lewis Barrow). The tone is a practical founder-to-interviewer recounting of strategy, execution, and lessons from the round.
So, you know, when was the recent fundraising round?
Yeah, so we started fundraising around November. So we realized we had a lot of momentum. We had raised our original seed round, I want to say in like 2017 or 2018. So it was a while from raising our seed round to raising a Series A. We were profitable. We used services like Capchase. to sort of finance the growth. We found that to be a super value add. And then over time, we realized we were growing a lot and there was this unique opportunity to really swing for the fences in the space where that's growing a lot. So we decided to start raising our Series A around November. So yeah, I could talk about that if that's helpful.
Yeah, I would love to. I'll jump into that and learn a little bit more about what that was like.
Yeah, so our round was definitely way more nuanced, non-traditional. We started off raising through Stonks. I'm not sure if you guys are familiar with Stonks, but it's like this live demo day marketplace, and, you know, we started there. We raised some money through there. We got connected to a lot of different investors, so that was step one. After that, you know, we started raising through a roll-up vehicle on AngelList, which was, you know, I would highly recommend that. That was probably the biggest game changer for us because it allowed us to raise from our customers. It allowed us to raise from our, you know, most passionate users. So that was really fun. And it also allowed us to raise from just other founders that really resonated with what we're doing. We've been, you know, legal tech which is the space we're in, had a pretty bad rap. You know, I think like a lot of people were scarred by, you know, maybe Atrium going under, because a lot of notable people invested in that round. And, you know, we weren't the, the, the most shiniest startup coming through a lot of people's rooms, right? Because we had this gap of like 3 years where we didn't really fundraise. So we really relied on like the community, our users, other founders, at the earliest stages of that fundraise. Then over time, we ended up finding a few different leads that were interested, and then we found one that we were just like super aligned with. His name is Louis Barrow. He runs a small venture fund. He's also a founder too, and, you know, he kind of led the round at the very end, and it all came together that way.
Awesome. Yeah, that's really great to hear, and thanks for sharing with us. Yeah, I was actually going to ask, you know, if what that was kind of like, getting some of the, I would say, investors to kind of come back around to LawTrades, as you mentioned, 3 years later.
Yes. My co-founder did a really good job at telling the story, telling the narrative. We were in a much different position now than when we were when we tried fundraising for our first seed round, which was brutal. That was really hard. But the Series A was a lot easier because we had metrics on our side. We had good product-market fit. You know, we knew that 3 months from now, if someone passed on us now, like it's their loss. We knew that this was going to keep growing regardless of if someone joined us or not. So it really allowed us to align our interests as a company, our values with the right people that thought about it the same way. So we didn't raise from people that were, you know, that wanted like 20% of the company or 30% of the company or anything like that. We really raised from people that were super aligned with our mission. And the nice part about doing a roll-up vehicle, as an example, is the check size is really small for people to join. So that allowed people to make really small bets. And over time, I want to say somewhere between 60 to 80 people individually invested through our roll-up vehicle. And we had a really great presentation for them that they could view in one click. My co-founder also had it linked to a video that really described what we were trying to do along with some of our future plans and how we were going to use this. And everything was really presented on this one clean deck through a company called Journey. So check out Journey if you're not familiar with them. It's journey.io and it's like DocSend on steroids. And we pretty much crafted this amazing presentation on Journey, and the final link was a link for someone to invest, you know, as long as they were accredited, and AngelList handled all that for us. So that's how that journey went about. When it came to finding our lead investor, Lewis, uh, that took, you know, maybe, I want to say, a culmination of maybe like 4 to 6 different phone calls. He asked great questions. We could just tell he really resonated with what we were going through as a company. And he understood the dynamics around legal tech because he was in Silicon Valley. So he, over time, you know, we came to terms with him and he ended up joining and being, you know, the biggest check in the round.
Yeah, that's really great to hear. We actually have a lot of founders in the community that also use Rollup Vehicles. So—
Yeah, it's a great tool.
Yeah, they're great. Yeah, we have actually a lot share in the fundraising space so that way they can, you know, pull together some of the soft commits from some of the group chats. I guess, that are, you know, operators and angels themselves. So, yep.
And we also did syndicates through AngelList too. So we were all over their platform at the earliest stages of the round.
