You’re not writing a contract for literary pleasure, it has to be true and accurate. This means that an attorney regularly returns to the same definition or clause. With an AI-based platform, Henchman start-up Ghent offers them a way to do this very efficiently.

Not every attorney has to deal with it, but employees of law firm Healthy. They had to negotiate and draw up elaborate contracts. And that, as practice shows, often comes down to looking for precedents, says Jorn Vanysacker, co-founder of Henchman. “They searched for definitions and clauses in previous contracts, meaning they soon found themselves going through folders and files until they found what they were looking for.”

It could be better, says one start-up founder. “Especially when you know that all of those big law firms are sitting on piles of data,” continues Vanysacker. “But they haven’t drafted it, or even regulated it in some cases.” We want to provide an answer to this with a cloud-based SaaS platform. We are compatible with most major database programs and with approximately 85 percent of specialized legal data software or document management systems. In other words, we can store all possible data mine.’

The process just happens in the background, and can take hours to days – depending on the amount of information. But once done, an attorney can run a simple search on the particular clause or definition he or she wants to reuse.

Sales out

Antek is also language agnostic, so anyone with a database in Dutch will be able to search for it in Dutch. And that goes for any language. In this way, the platform has found users in fifteen countries, accounting for around a hundred paying customers. “At first we didn’t look for it ourselves,” says the founder. ‘As of today, half of new customers find us via our website.’

But out sales should become more important in the future. Vanysacker: ‘Mainly because we want to focus on the US and UK, where we already have dedicated teams active. In addition, we also want to continue to develop our tool, so that it remains optimally user-friendly. To this end, we hold discussions with end users every quarter, so that we get as close to their expectations as possible’.

At the same time, Antek also tries to integrate the most relevant new technologies. ‘For example, we work with GPT-3 to enrich clauses on the fly and adapt them to the specific context of a particular contract. For example, you can change the singular to the plural with the press of a button.’

Business angel

The minion’s ambitions are very high, but it has filled the greenhouse for it. The pre-seed round brought in an initial capital of one million euros, after which VC funds Pitchdrive (Lorenz Bogaert and others), among others, stepped in for another two million. Last week, the company was able to announce a Series A round, involving American Adjacent and German Acton Capital.

Various business angels, including Louis Jonckheere, Pieterjan Bouten and Hendrik Isebaert van Showpad, Felix Van de Maele (Collibra), Bram Couvreur (partner at American law firm Cooley) and Koen Christiaans (Founder of Rydoo) also joined, while the current shareholder is still invested a bit more, and subsidies from VLAIO and family investment company F3 Finance completed the financing. ‘All good for 6.5 million euros’, concludes Vanysacker. ‘We now want to further realize our growth with this.’