Hence Technologies, a Rwandan online marketplace for lawyers, has closed a $1.8 million seed funding. This takes the total amount raised by the startup, so far, to $2.6 million.
Investors that took part in the round include Daybreak Partners, Broad Creek Capital (a global private investment partnership started by two former lawyers Matthew Ruesch and Michael W. Green), Daglar Cizmeci and a number of other angel investors.
Founded in 2020 by Steve Heitkamp, Sean West and Arun Shanmuganathan, Hence Technologies uses data from various sources to match the internal legal teams of its client companies with external legal service providers — which gives it the ability to recommend lawyers based on the nature of the assignment, location and cost considerations.
Per use of the funding, Hence Technologies co-founder Steve Heitkamp said: “We plan to use the funding to grow our team, especially the technical talent, with some more spending on marketing. We’ve already brought on someone who has a marketing background and has experience working with law firms.”
Heitkamp adds that to ensure precise matching, they’ve had to integrate data (including qualitative) from different places, including from clients’ billing systems, to build recommendation systems that help companies in decision making.
“Very limited information and data is used to make decisions on who to hire. And we felt like the companies were missing out on an opportunity to leverage data even from their own experiences. If a company is spending $200 million a year, then there is an opportunity to understand a lot of different things like what’s working well and what’s not,” said Heitkamp.
Daybreak Partners founder Nate Dalton said, “…with Hence, there is finally a tool that allows clients to move from large-scale, mostly anecdotal, decision making to empirical evidence-based decision making, with continuous improvement after every interaction.
“These last two years have ushered in a period of incredible change in the way we work, and it is very exciting to see the team at Hence leveraging the talent in Kigali and the Palantir platform to begin to execute on their vision to dramatically improve the efficiency of the global professional services markets.”
