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Over the course of turbulent 2022, 1,800+ companies raised a total of over £549M on SeedLegals.
Those figures are particularly impressive considering the challenges startups looking for funding faced last year. With global conflict, supply chain issues, market volatility and fears of a recession on the menu, many investors lost their risk appetite and startups found there was less money to go around.
But companies with strong fundamentals and a unique value proposition bucked this trend. In this post, we’re celebrating some of the companies with the biggest raises in 2022 and finding out what’s next on their agenda.
To date, companies have raised a whopping £1.3B through funding rounds and agile funding on SeedLegals.
In this post
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Apotec is on a mission to support pharmacies through fast, intuitive and innovative software and services. The team has over 200 years of combined experience in the community pharmacy IT space and will launch their CRM (customer relationship management) platform this year.
What made investors want to back Apotec? 🏆
Investors were impressed by Apotec’s well-researched and balanced medium-term business plan, which included a clear and concise executive summary, complete with ROI levels and timeframes.
Achieving SEIS/EIS HMRC accreditation was also a big help as they raised £4.5M under the SEIS/EIS schemes, 60% of which has come directly from Community Pharmacy stakeholders.
How did SeedLegals help? 🌱
We loved the easy-to-use 24/7 portal and intuitive document creation wizards. We felt fully supported by a friendly and knowledgeable team – all at a competitive price point.
Stephen Hards
Commercial Director,
What’s next for Apotec? 🚀
2023 will be a very exciting year for Apotec with the launch of their CRM product. They’ll carry on using SeedLegals to manage and create documents and will be back in touch with our funding experts if they raise another round.
Checkstep raised £3.8M through a seed round and Instant Investment.
Checkstep is on a mission to make the internet a safer place for everyone. Their content moderation platform uses AI to detect and take quick, accurate and consistent action against harmful text, audio, image and video content across multiple languages.
Checkstep has recently been named one of Notion Capital’s top 100 SaaS companies in Europe.
What made investors want to back Checkstep? 🏆
The problem: Nearly all online platforms need content moderation and very little of that work is automated. Enter Checkstep.
The opportunity: There are four major trends pushing the growth of the market.
- Businesses need to comply with upcoming regulations in Europe and the UK
- Due to the economic downturn, companies are looking to spend less on operations. Checkstep provides insights and automation that can reduce cost by more than 50%
- The demand is increasing for social components in nearly every app and website. People want more community-led features
- Generative AI systems make it easy for unscrupulous actors to create an overwhelming amount of content very quickly, which could include deceptive, plagiarised, and generally low-quality material. Human content moderators can’t keep up
Checkstep’s solution: Together, Checkstep’s team of trust and safety experts and machine learning specialists built a complete software platform to manage threats caused by unwanted user-generated content.
How did SeedLegals help? 🌱
Guillaume BouchardSeedLegals has been a phenomenal partner. We’ve not only used them for our capital raise, but also for our EMI option scheme, R&D Tax Credit claim and EIS scheme. Everyone we’ve talked to at SeedLegals has far exceeded our expectations.
I regularly tell people that I don’t even know how I could create a startup without SeedLegals. It speeds up our internal processes and de-risks our legal operation so much that SeedLegals has become our de facto ‘startup operating system’.
Co-founder and CEO,
What’s next for Checkstep? 🚀
Checkstep is planning for a big growth year in 2023. There’s high demand for their content moderation platform already, and the upcoming regulations in the UK (Online Safety Bill) and the European Union (Digital Services Act) will keep them even busier.
Finverity is reinventing supply chain finance (SCF) to make the global financial system work for all. They believe technology can bridge the $1.7trn global trade finance gap by channelling capital to where it’s most needed.
What made investors want to back Finverity? 🏆
Finverity credits their ability to attract investors to their powerful tech capabilities. Finverity can deploy enterprise-level solutions to banks in just 21 days versus the industry average of 9 months.
Finverity grew their revenue 15x during 2022, which proved to investors that there was a large and interested market for their product.
Combined with the favourable macroeconomic climate for SCF and factoring, this led to the round being heavily oversubscribed.
How did SeedLegals help? 🌱
Alex FenechiuSeedLegals made the entire cap table management, legal due diligence of historical rounds and overall terms negotiation incredibly easy for us as founders.
Co-founder and COO,
What’s next for Finverity? 🚀
In 2023, Finverity continues to grow, opening three new offices in the UAE, Kenya and Poland, while expanding its tech capabilities to cover all products in the working capital space.
Green Lithium is building the UK’s first large-scale merchant lithium refinery, creating a European supply of low-carbon, battery-grade lithium hydroxide to sell into the electric vehicle supply chain.
What made investors want to back Green Lithium? 🏆
The opportunity was fairly unique in offering UK retail investors the opportunity to invest in a green infrastructure asset that is fundamental to the UK’s critical mineral strategy. The potential upside returns for investors are significant, while the availability of HMRC’s EIS relief provided corresponding downside protection.
How did SeedLegals help? 🌱
Jo CharlesSeedLegals provided an end-to-end solution for the legal administrative aspects of the transaction. The SeedLegals team was hands on with its support where, for example, we needed to tailor terms to our specific needs.
CFO,
What’s next for Green Lithium? 🚀
Having successfully raised £5.7M to date, including a UK government grant and £3.5M in our 2022 fundraise, Green Lithium are now focused on making further progress on their Teesside refinery project. They’ll continue to raise more private and retail investor funds before raising corporate/institutional investment later in 2023, so please do get in via the website or at [email protected].
Grubby raised £2.3M in 2022 through their pre-Series A and Instant Investment top ups
Grubby is the UK’s highest rated recipe kit subscription that just so happens to be 100% plant-based. Launched in 2019, their rapidly growing customer base is now over 50,000 and last year they reported revenues of over £3M with more than half a million meals delivered to date.
Their recipes are designed to be ‘low on faff and full on flavour’. Each one comes with a Spotify playlist to chop along to and an industry-first personalised impact dashboard for customers to track their foodprint. They also donate a meal to a child in poverty for every box sold.
What made investors want to back Grubby? 🏆
Martin Holden-WhiteGrubby is playing in a number of super high-growth areas that show no signs of letting up – meat-free, online food deliveries and meal kits.
We’ve proven we’re not a niche product by virtue of the fact around 80% of our customers aren’t actually vegan. They’re just people who want to eat well whilst reducing their meat intake.
Ultimately, we’ve always delivered on our promises and we’ve outperformed our growth forecasts since we started with 425% growth in 2022.
Founder,
How did SeedLegals help? 🌱
SeedLegals helped Grubby execute their funding rounds efficiently. They appreciated that our comms were always fast and to the point – and that they weren’t tied up in calls that were charged by the minute when they wanted to get back to the kitchen.
What’s next for Grubby? 🚀
Now Grubby has the foundations of their tech, product and logistics in a great place, they can offer customers even more choice and flexibility. Plans are in motion for fantastic new tech features coming on the app and some exciting collaborations to supercharge the customer experience and keep everyone coming back for more.
“We’re going to be raising our Series A soon too, so naturally we’re on the lookout for VCs who share our values and want to come on the journey with us!” adds Grubby founder Martin.
Home is going to transform the way we buy, rent and manage our homes. Whether you’re a homeowner or a renter, the process of moving is highly stressful and surprisingly analogue. Home’s digital applications allow everyone involved in a property transaction to be in control.
What made investors want to back Home? 🏆
Jayne HarveyOur investors saw the opportunity to transform a valuable market by digitising a highly fragmented and unregulated value chain. We don’t see ourselves as disruptors but believe we can create value for traditional businesses in this sector such as agents and conveyancers. We always keep the home mover at the heart of our product.
COO,
How did SeedLegals help? 🌱
SeedLegals has supported Home from the start of planning their agile raise, and were a source of knowledge and insights while deciding the right strategy.
What’s next for Home? 🚀
2023 is all about adoption of the platform. Home will launch in the UK at scale from the end of Q2 and the team is already in discussions about opening up international markets. While their seed raise supported the product build and launch, their next raise in Q3 will help the business to scale.
Promotigo helps brands create engaging digital experiences that deliver the ‘value exchange’ needed for consumers to willingly share their data with the brands they trust.
The platform offers a wide range of templated end-to-end experiences, including prize draws, competitions, digital coupons, and product sampling solutions. In short, Promotigo simplifies, scales, and secures the complex work of digital gamification.
Our campaign and data management platform-with-a-service, saves costs, increases speed to market, and gathers zero-party consumer data securely whilst also automating the fulfilment process.
What made investors want to back Promotigo? 🏆
Nick DeyongWe recently completed our first funding round and have attracted a team of investors with strong domain experience to help power the company forward. We opted for ‘smart money’ where each investor also has valuable advice and connections to bring.
Co-founder and CEO,
How did SeedLegals help? 🌱
SeedLegals were invaluable in making the process quick and simple for Promotigo and their investors, saving them thousands of pounds in legal fees and completely eliminating paperwork.
What’s next for Promotigo? 🚀
Promotigo is excited to continue adding new features and experiences to the platform over the next year.
With the innovative platform, expert team, and strong partnerships, Promotigo is confident in their ability to deliver real value to both clients and their customers and deliver compelling results for their own investors in the future.
Sook raised £2.15M via a funding round, plus SeedFASTs and Instant Investment
Sook digitises physical space and retail operations, so businesses can run their own stores by the hour. By partnering with leading UK property asset managers, they can offer iconic locations like London’s Oxford Street to their customers for fully branded pop-up events. Customers include household names like Uber, Depop and TikTok.
What made investors want to back Sook? 🏆
John HoyleSook offers investors a truly unique business model to back. We are the first mover in the global serviced retail market, and have already gained impressive traction with property asset managers and global brands alike.
Our commitment to delivering positive social and environmental impact aligns with many investors’ focus as we look towards the future of our planet.
In 2022, Sook raised funds from prominent technology angel investors, across four continents. We continue to grow our brand’s presence in the space and to develop a proprietary suite of software products, offering investors an opportunity to invest ahead of the curve, in an underserved global market.
Founder and CEO,
Sook counts SeedLegals as a key partner in their fundraising success. SeedLegals was an excellent all-in-one tool for the full spectrum of fundraising tasks – from defining the round terms to issuing EIS certificates.
Not only was the process easy, Sook found our knowledge and on-demand expert support particularly helpful when negotiating the nuances of the deal.
Wombat Invest wants to make investing easy, accessible, and stress-free – for everyone. Through their global investment platform, Wombat provides immediate access to fractional investing in a range of thematic funds, ETFs, and shares. Fractional investing and the user-friendly platform make investing more accessible and affordable to millions of people around the world, allowing them to save for their future.
What made investors want to back Wombat? 🏆
The unique proposition. Wombat is laser focused on curating some of the most accessible funds and stocks on the market and translating them into an easy-to-understand and digestible format.
Wombat credits their success at raising in a tricky macro-economic climate to their tech stack, their people and their approach to achieving great things with such a small but strong team.
How did SeedLegals help? 🌱
Kane HarrisonSeedLegals have helped us since inception and throughout every stage of our funding journey to date. They’ve been reliable and hands on and are readily available in times of pressing need (always the case in a startup!)
Founder and CEO,
What’s next for Wombat? 🚀
A lot of exciting things – some big launches and expansion are on the horizon as well as a continued effort to make the app full of features, robust and ready to grow even further.
