Building an ecosystem

Athennian has big plans and ambitious goals, and it recently received a major boost. The Calgary-based legal tech firm specializing in corporate records, received $15 million in Series A funding. The funds include support from Clio CEO Jack Newton and Arthur Ventures, an early-growth capital firm. Athennian is now one of the top five most valued legal tech companies in Canada.

"With Clio, I've been involved in the legal technology space for over a decade, and it is my great privilege to empower the next generation of founders to build innovative solutions," says Newton. "I look forward to seeing how Athennian continues to drive a positive digital transformation for the legal entity management space in the years to come—and join Clio as a Canadian tech success story."

It all started five years ago when co-founder and CEO Adrian Camara was working as a corporate finance and mergers and acquisitions lawyer for McCarthy Tétrault. He noticed inefficiencies in compiling corporate information and minute books. He teamed up with Mark Tinana and Shane Fast, both experienced in tech development, and had Athennian ready for market by 2017.

"I've known Adrian Camara since the very early days of Athennian, and have always been impressed by his vision and passion," says Newton. "Cloud-based technologies like Athennian have become integral to a law firm's ability to run an efficient practice and a successful business, while providing the seamless experiences clients have come to expect."

Athennian manages corporate files ranging from stock certificates to organizational charts using a dashboard. DocuSign, the popular e-signature tool, is integrated into the system so files can be easily generated and stored. The team quickly won over big clients, including Fasken, Torys and Dentons.

"Law firms and legal departments are working to digitize their corporate records, and they want to move to the cloud," says Camara. "Most of that data is stuck in physical minutes books. The data is sitting in very old end-of-life software."

The pandemic lockdown accelerated Athennian's growth as firms were forced to move their documents and processes online. "There are thousands of square feet of minute books that need to be digitized," says Camara. "There's so much demand."

A year ago, Athennian had 15 employees, most of them based in Calgary. Now the company has ballooned to 70 employees with plans to hire more. Only 40% of their employees are in Calgary. "We have people from across Canada from Vancouver to Halifax," says Josh Malate, Chief Operating Officer for Athennian. "We wanted the best talent, and we're focused on what's important, which is our clients. We're looking at how we can better support customers."

Part of Athennian's success is their commitment to security. "Security is critical to our growth," says Malate, adding that it's an essential client demand. They have a team of ten people dedicated to it.

In October 2020, Athennian acquired Rodox, a Montreal-based tech company that creates organizational charts. The acquisition is part of Athennian's strategy to be the "Salesforce of Legal," where customers can  use Athennian as their go-to portal for all things related to corporate law.

As the company grows, so do its ambitions regarding data. Big data analytics remains a challenge in the legal market because most data is unstructured or trapped in paper documents. Legacy software is rarely compatible, and law firms and legal departments are reluctant to share data, making it difficult to get good industry analysis.

Athennian wants to change that by creating reports focused on emerging trends in corporate law, by drawing insight from information about the hundreds of thousands of active entities listed in their system, and roughly 35 million corporate records.  "We have the largest structural data on corporate law in Canada," says Camara. "It's hard to get data on private companies." And yet clients want insights on matters such as diversity and inclusion in private companies, and representation on boards and ownership.

The company will take an "ecosystem approach" by releasing an open API (application programming interface) in the second quarter of this year. Open APIs allow developers to build plug-ins that can be integrated with Attennian's software. Clio uses a similar approach and has apps for major tech providers, including Microsoft, Google and Zoom.

"This is a high data ecosystem," says Camara. "We can't build the services for all of it. You have to decide if you want to be Blackberry or iPhone. RIM wanted to control everything and build the applications on their own. Apple decided to let others build on top of the platform. Not many legal startups think about building a platform, but we see that as the best way to serve our customers."

Most of their Series A funding will be used for research and development as Athennian looks to leverage the data and build their platform. "We're constantly surprised that we're the largest team working on this problem," says Malate. "Law firms don't have a team of engineers to go through all the data. We can do it."