Rwandan Based Startup Secures $1.8 Million Seed Funding

A Rwandan based online platform for lawyers, Hence Technologies, has secured a $1.8 million seed funding which it aims to use grow its team.

The seed funding round was led by Daybreak Partners, Broad Creek Capital, Daglar Cizmeci and a number of other angel investors. The Rwandese startup is also partly based in London.

The startup uses data and AI to match firms with external legal service providers hence giving it the ability to recommend lawyers based on the nature of the assignment, location and cost considerations.

It was founded in 2020 by Steve Heitkamp, Sean West, and Arun Shanmuganathan.

According to Steve Heitkamp, Co-founder of Hence Technologies, the startup plans to use the funding to grow the team, especially the technical talent with some more spending on marketing.

“We’ve already brought on someone who has a marketing background and has experience working with law firm,” he stated.

Heitkamp added that to ensure precise matching, they’ve had to integrate data (including qualitative) from different places, including from clients’ billing systems, to build recommendation systems that help companies in decision making.

“Very limited information and data is used to make decisions on who to hire. And we felt like the companies were missing out on an opportunity to leverage data even from their own experiences. If a company is spending $200 million a year, then there is an opportunity to understand a lot of different things like what’s working well and what’s not,” said Heitkamp.

Daybreak Partners founder Nate Dalton said, “…with Hence, there is finally a tool that allows clients to move from large-scale, mostly anecdotal, decision making to empirical evidence-based decision making, with continuous improvement after every interaction.

“These last two years have ushered in a period of incredible change in the way we work, and it is very exciting to see the team at Hence leveraging the talent in Kigali and the Palantir platform to begin to execute on their vision to dramatically improve the efficiency of the global professional services markets.”

This seed round takes the total amount secured by the startup,  to $2.6 million.