Document technology company Litera will buy Toronto-based Kira, for an undisclosed sum, in a bid to boost its transaction management platform with Kira’s machine learning capabilities, Litera CEO Avaneesh Marwaha said in a statement.
“Kira enables us to provide total diligence for the transaction and deal management lifecycle,” Marwaha said.
Venture capital and private equity firm Insight Partners, which invested $50 million in Kira in August 2018, will further its investment in Kira and become a minority investor in Litera, the companies said. Private equity firm Hg, which bought Litera from K1 Investment Management in 2019, will maintain its majority stake.
Litera, which says it has more than 15,000 law firm and corporate customers, has acquired several other companies in the past two years. So far in 2021, other deals include budgeting and pricing platform Clocktimizer in April and document productivity software company DocsCorp in March.
The deal between two well-known players in the legal tech sector is the latest transaction in the booming industry. Legal tech companies of all sizes have attracted funding this year from venture capital and private equity firms – just this week, legal tech startup LawVu raised a Series A funding round led by Insight. E-discovery provider CS Disco Inc and online legal services company LegalZoom both made public debuts, while other companies have gone down the M&A route like Litera.
“Litera is the perfect partner for Kira,” Noah Waisberg, Kira CEO and co-founder, said in a statement. “They have a deep understanding of the legal market globally and share our vision that technology can transform the contract review process.”
The transaction will “ensure Kira achieves ubiquity in the due diligence review process, as well as provide a welcome home for our customers and employees,” he said.
Waisberg, a former Weil, Gotshal & Manges associate, launched Kira in 2010 with Alexander Hudek, a computer scientist. The company’s machine learning technology lets lawyers review contracts efficiently and mitigate risks, the announcement said.
Waisberg will be a strategic advisor to Litera. He will also lead Zuva, a new company that Kira will spin off as part of the transaction that launch in September. Zuva will apply artificial intelligence in new products aimed at the corporate market that will “enable the world’s businesses to know what’s in their contracts,” the companies said
