Acton Capital invests in Series A-Round in Henchman

Backing the next generation of legal tech – four years after the exit of global SaaS pioneer Clio, Acton Capital invests in AI-powered Henchman from Ghent, Belgium. Founded during the COVID-pandemic in 2011 by Jorn Vanysacker, Gilles Mattelin, and Wouter Van Respaille, Henchman’s software solution grants seamless access to its platform automating the search for relevant clauses and definitions when drafting legal contracts.

Legal professionals rarely start from a blank sheet of paper when drafting contracts or negotiating details with other parties. They usually reference existing documentation, for which they need to sift through countless old contracts or talk to colleagues to find suitable precedents that could be relevant to their case. Henchman solves this problem by automatically centralizing past clauses and definitions from any legal team’s contract database – whether law firm or corporate legal department – and delivering them intelligently in lawyers’ familiar Microsoft Word or Outlook environments.

Henchman helps the lawyer of the future provide added value and expertise: ​

With its AI-based functionality, lawyers use Henchman already to enrich contracts with new suggestions, translations or grammatical adaptations. The fresh capital injection will be used to support continued company growth and to further drive innovation in its platform that automates the search for relevant clauses and definitions when drafting legal contracts. The funding follows hot on the heels of Henchman’s recent GPT‑3 integration and will be used to strengthen its focus on innovation and expand geographically.

"When everyone was still talking about ChatGPT, we already started implementing the technology in Henchman."--Gilles Mattelin, co-founder of Henchman

Henchman has been on a remarkable trajectory since launching in June 2021 and has experienced rapid adoption last year: 750% revenue growth, a team growing from 12 to 35 employees, and over 100 customers in 15 countries.

“After some reference calls we saw that Henchman’s power lies within how perfectly the product fits into the legal professionals’ existing workflow. It’s rare to see a SaaS company win international clients this early on, but the teams’ customer obsession is driving great adoption in both Europe and the US. I’m excited to team up as we scale to the next level,” -- Nico Wittenborn, investor at NYC-based Adjacent VC.

Our goal is to enable lawyers to spend more time on high-value tasks that can set them apart from their competitors.

Gilles Mattelin, co-founder of Henchman

“Since Henchman requires no set-up and updates automatically, customers can immediately start repurposing thousands, even millions of clauses based on relevant suggestions. There’s an immediate added value in terms of efficiency and speed,” -- Gilles Mattelin, co-founder of Henchman.