Nigerian-led legal tech startup Definely raises £2.2m seed fund

Nigerian-led LegalTech startup, Definely has announced it raised a $3m funding round. The funding round was led by Microsoft’s venture fund, M12, and supported by CRE Venture Capital.

This round brings the startup’s total funding to £3.4m following a seed round in September 2020.

Definely was founded in 2017 by the duo of Nnamdi Emelifeonwu (CEO) and Feargus Macdaeid to take away all the stress lawyers had to go through when sifting through endless pages of both soft and hard copies of legal documents to find and make sense of the major information they need.

Definely leverages its Artificial Intelligence (AI) to simplify the drafting, reading, and understanding of contracts.

The startup boasts a 500% year-over-year growth rate in user base, with some of the world’s largest law firms, financial institutions, and multinational corporations including Deloitte, Allen & Overy, and Dentons.

Definely’s Co-founder and CEO, Nnamdi Emelifeonwu speaking on the funding said that legal tech was quickly becoming an integral part of how today’s legal practitioners work.

“Legal technology is stepping out of nascency and becoming embedded in how the modern-day lawyer works. Definely not only speeds up the review and drafting process but importantly it allows a lawyer to be more accurate with their output because they never have to leave where they are and lose context when working on a document,” he said.

Definely was recognized as one of the 10 most exciting early stage scaleups in the UK during the 2021 Tech Nation Rising Stars competition and was also one of 6 Nigerian-led startups selected for the inaugural Google for Startups £2m funds for Black Founders in Europe.

Definely also recently, the startup won the ‘Most Promising Mature Business’ award during KPMG’s Black Entrepreneurs’ Awards.

Definely intends to use the funding to accelerate its product development, expand its world-class team, and drive further expansion into markets beyond the UK.