Legaltech Josef partners with fellow startup Luna to bring lawyer-bot to the ecosystem

Melbourne legaltech startup Josef is working with fellow Aussie startup Luna to help out even more startups by demystifying the complexities of the fundraising process.

Luna, formerly #CorporateAdvice, has launched the Luna Investment Hub, a platform offering information and advice designed to help startups secure investment in Australia, in partnership with Startup Victoria.

The startup has brought Josef, a Startmate accelerator graduate founded less than a year ago, on board to provide a bot that takes information about a startup and produces a drafted term sheet that can be presented to investors.

In a statement, Luna founder Ronan Heine said he works with hundreds of startups a year.

“We know both investor and founder pain points intimately,” he said.

“We wanted to demystify the investment process.”

Founded by Sam Flynn, Tom Dreyfus and Kirill Kliavin, Josef was conceived after Flynn and a friend built a web-based app to provide legal support to people issued with Myki transport fines in Melbourne.

Within a month, the app had 60,000 users, Flynn says, with no marketing spend.

“I realised if you build good legaltech, people will come”, he tells StartupSmart.

There’s a serious demand for legaltech people don’t necessarily even know they need, he says.

The co-founders came together to create a Software-as-a-Service solution putting that power of tech into the hands of “any lawyer anywhere”, by allowing them to create their own chatbots for clients, Flynn says.

Initially, it was a passion project, aimed at helping community legal centres help as many people as possible.

The startup’s first customer was a small personal-injury firm in Melbourne. Less than a year later, while it’s still working with community lawyers, Josef has also expanded to the US and Europe, and is working with top-tier commercial law firms and organisations such as the American Bar Association.

Over the past six months, Josef’s top-line revenue has increased by 510%, Flynn says.

“We’re continuing to grow,” he adds.

“We’re building on our product and expanding around the world.”

The greatest resource

Josef was built to serve the community through legal software, and through the partnership with Luna, it’s now expanding that support to the startup ecosystem.

The team at Luna “used their expertise in startup law and strategic advice to startups to build out this hub”, Flynn says, while Josef built the term-sheet bot.

Through Startmate and working in co-working spaces, the Josef founders feel they’re “a real part of the startup community here”, Flynn says.

“We saw a lot of startups going through the investment process and having unanswered questions,” he adds.

“It’s cool to have a product, and a platform, that can share that info more widely.”

For Flynn, having a strong connection to the startup ecosystem is something that has helped Josef get to where it is today.

For other startup founders, he recommends “developing good, strong relationships with the investment and startup community, and being open and honest and doing what you say you’re going to do”.

The community is “one of the greatest resources I have”, he says.

“I speak to other startups daily, about everything from hiring to investment to training to marketing … I encourage anyone to go and find a community to draw on and to learn from,” he adds.

This is also why he’s passionate about the term-sheet bot, and the partnership with Luna.

“It’s about finding people that you connect with, and that you share a mission with,” he says.

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