Meet Anthony Rose, co-founder and CEO of SeedLegals
SeedLegals, which closes more UK investment rounds than any other company or law firm, has worked with over 35,000 UK companies and investors since it was launched in 2016 to transform the way they start, grow and scale.
Co-founded by Anthony Rose, the man behind BBC’s iPlayer, and serial entrepreneur Laurent Laffy, SeedLegals automates the legals startups and small businesses need from funding to option schemes, contracts and R&D tax credits.
What does your business offer its target audience?
Fundraising clearly plays a key role in startups and SMEs growth, however too much time and expense is put on legal affairs in the process.
Simply put, SeedLegals cuts down these processes by automating the whole journey to help founders raise money in the simplest way possible - whether that’s a one-off investment, a full funding round or top-ups.
What’s the most common problem your customers approach you with?
We all know how crucial agility is in the startup world, yet businesses struggle to cover all bases when they’re fundraising. This results in substantial amounts of resources spent on manual tasks that could be simplified.
Startups need to be able to gather and share information instantly - and that’s where we come in. For instance, when furloughing was first announced, within 48 hours SeedLegals was fully prepared to provide businesses with comprehensive information. All relevant documents and knowledge was available online to businesses anywhere in the world, which was of course vital during the pandemic.
Recently, we’re seeing investor ‘ghosting’ becoming more common. Earlier this year, we conducted research that found more than half of founders saw investors pull out of a financial deal after they had committed, which can be devastating for early-stage businesses in the middle of a funding round. This is one of the reasons why we launched Pitch - a quick and easy way to create and share your pitch with investors.
How do you think you’ve innovated your sector and why?
By working closely with the legal industry to help it improve. We believe that the key to innovation is identifying a clear consumer need. In our case, this was to enable founders to spend less money and time on legal documents, to help them raise funds more easily.
Fundraising is a critical part of a small business so the process must be organised and methodical. We innovated the sector by launching the world’s first platform that automates all the costly, legal tasks founders and investors need to complete to do a funding round.
Any new product launches we should know about?
Pitch has revolutionised the way small businesses showcase their proposition to investors before a fundraising round. By making it simple to collate and share access to essential information such as the raised target, valuation, (S)EIS eligibility and a pitch video, SeedLegals has neatly packaged the whole fundraising process in one product.
We don’t just help founders in the early stages of their journey - our A+ service helps companies who are at Series A and beyond. SeedLegals’ Cohort Manager is also transforming portfolio management through a custom-built system that speeds up cohort administration at accelerators and incubators to groundbreaking levels.
What are your thoughts on automation and how it could impact our economy?
More than automation, people are looking for a solution for their businesses. They want a solution that provides support 24/7 and gives them answers to questions they’re embarrassed to ask because they don’t know the answers.
At SeedLegals we go beyond automating the creation and signing of a legal document. In fact, automation is a small part of our platform - it’s there to serve its master. Actually, what makes a true impact for our customers is the sharing of knowledge and the empowerment we give founders.
If you limit yourself to thinking about automation, this distracts you from understanding what customers really want. We don’t see the automatic creation of a document as the alternative to a law firm or its manual craft. When you create a document, it’s a reflection of what you want - the actual solution is to help founders understand what they want, what’s the market standard, which terms they could get away with, which they could negotiate and what to settle for. Then SeedLegals builds the document for you. That's automation.
What plans do you have for SeedLegals over the next two years?
I believe in starting by building utility and then building a network.
At SeedLegals, we have now worked with over 35,000 businesses and investors, so taking things to the next level means extending our reach and covering more bases in businesses’ growth plans - we have recently reached a significant funding milestone: we’ve closed over £1bn in investments for UK companies.
Step one was helping founders close their funding rounds faster, and step two was showing them how not to do a funding round. We’ve shown them there are alternatives to traditional funding such as agile fundraising. Our agile funding services have completely transformed how UK startups grow - our customers have used agile methods to raise as much outside of traditional rounds as within them.
Our growth will happen in several areas of our business over the next two years, but specifically around equity, so step three will be connecting investors and founders to groundbreaking levels. We want to make it easier for businesses to find investment opportunities and for investors to monitor the companies that match their investment criteria. Founders won’t need to raise funds in the same way that they had to before.
Essentially our goal is, and will continue to be, to become the platform that helps founders build their companies faster.
Describe your business in three words.
Fundraising: faster, easier.
Tell us about your journey into this market.
I led the YouView team at the BBC as CTO from 2007 to 2010, where I led the launch of BBC’s iPlayer. I then left to embark on my entrepreneurial journey, co-founding four companies.
I gained a deep understanding of the startup ecosystem, specially on the practice of fundraising, when I met my SeedLegals co-founder, Laurent Laffy at a party. We both realised we had one thing in common - a track record of spending large amounts of money on law firms for the same legal documents at every funding round. We thought the whole process was unnecessarily long and complicated and wanted to create a better way for our community.
Why do you think your business has had such a positive impact across your industry?
Because we’ve finally brought founders and investors closer together.
To give you an example of the impact we’re having in the space: we found that 70% of founders had to chase up from one to ten investors five times before they got a response. Obviously, this can be nerve-wracking for the founders and their teams.
This is one of things that motivated us to launch Pitch - to make the whole fundraising journey simpler and safer for everyone involved. Founders appreciate being able to track who’s interested in their company, and then easily automatising the creation of the investment documents to secure the cash.
What are your top tips for entrepreneurs wanting to get their business out there?
The secret to success, if I may use the cliché, is to be lavish with your time for no immediate financial benefits. Spread knowledge you have and help others.
And to be ethical. I love providing customers with solutions, so I’d never enter into a deal with a partner that I didn’t feel aimed to truly help a customer.
Another tip for success is to do content marketing. In the early days of a company, nobody knows you. Of course, you could spend on paid advertising, but the starting point that builds ‘free’ SEO and trust is writing articles, getting out and doing presentations to spread the word on the things you’re an expert on. So if you are already or if you can become an expert on something, next ask yourself, how can I spread that and help others, and do it in a scalable way?
What’s the most important question entrepreneurs should be asking themselves?
The life of an entrepreneur always involves a dose of specific and uncertain challenges - even at the best of times. However, they must convey as much certainty as possible when meeting investors. I suggest to every entrepreneur that I meet that they need to showcase their business in the simplest way possible, so anyone can understand, and make sure they have the key financial metrics to highlight their success to date and in the future.
