Investment Notes: Atticus

We are excited to announce that Blackbird has invested in Atticus’ $10.8M capital raise.

Atticus is building a verification platform for regulated documents where the authors face compliance risk when the statements are incorrect.

Atticus has never raised a cent and has been profitable since they began life.

Gems in the Making

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Mitchell and Misha are Atticus’ co-founding engineers. They worked together at Palantir after studying Maths and Computer Science at the University of Melbourne. Misha’s brother, Saul, was a lawyer at Hall & Wilcox, where he ran one too many prospectus verifications and thought “there must be a better way”.

Misha and Mitchell worked with Thom at Palantir (Thom isn’t a lawyer or a computer scientist, he studied Mandarin and Persian at ANU). Between his stints at Palantir and Atticus, Thom was COO at HotDoc, overseeing the rollout of their COVID-19 vaccine bookings initiative - he is detailed, meticulous and the right operational partner for Saul, Misha, and Mitchell to allow them to focus on building. 

What we love most about this team is its obsession with the quality of the product.

Companies with great products and great product cultures always feel a sense of profound frustration with the current state of the product because it’s always lagging behind the vision they have for it in their minds. That’s Benjamin from Dovetail, that’s Melanie from Canva, and that’s all three founders at Atticus. 

A partner at a large law firm summed up Atticus beautifully:

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How do you build ‘life changing’ verification software? By obsessing over every detail of it for many years in close partnership with the people who use it.

Atticus are craftspeople of product and that obsession has been the driving force behind the company’s self-funded progress.

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Verification for Regulated Documents

Atticus hopes to become the software verification tool for documents that matter - empowering more trust in the public statements of organisations.

Regulated professionals (e.g. banks) will say we better use Atticus to verify our annual report numbers. Or, a board member will ask, has this been through Atticus?

Atticus will become the global benchmark for document verification. 

The problem today is that verification of regulated documents is currently an inefficient and haphazard manual process but essential to avoid liability for incorrect statements.

Atticus makes it easy to verify regulated documents - quickly, collaboratively, and securely. Their verification software significantly reduces the risk of accidentally publishing mistakes in regulated disclosure documents whilst generating time-savings of 60% on each verifiable document (8+ hours).

‍See Lyft’s earnings statement for an example! If Lyft was an Atticus customer, the ‘extra zero’ snafu would have been picked up earlier.

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Product

Launched in 2018, this product enables teams to identify material statements within disclosure documents and assign them to the relevant internal and external stakeholders to link supporting evidence. Think of a beautiful Google Docs experience with use cases that include:

• Investor relations (e.g. annual reports)
• Capital markets (e.g. prospectuses, information memorandums, offer booklets, presentations)
• Corporate (e.g. notices of meetings)
• M&A (e.g. scheme booklets, target statements)
• Funds (e.g. PDS, IMs, guides)

The product is sold directly to corporate customers (e.g. CBA) and law firms. 70% of their customer base are corporate customers, and the remainder are law firms.

There are three core value propositions: (1) efficiency, (2) reduced risk (i.e. liability), and (3) employee/client experience.

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Customer Love

Astonishingly, half of the ASX10 and 40% of the ASX50 are Atticus customers.

This breadth of enterprise logos with no sales team at this early stage in the company's life is remarkable and speaks to the volume of love for the product.

The beauty comes from the fact that many people work on each document so Atticus spreads virally by being shared to new users.

And, customers are addicted:

• “A revolution amongst the teams, in that sense a must-have.”
• ⁠“The best legal tech I’ve ever used. Literally a godsend in terms of ease of use.”
• “Wouldn’t do verification without it.”
• ⁠“Massive lifesaver. Used to take hours.”
• “The biggest barrier to legal tech is lawyer adoption. Atticus has been the most quickly adopted legal tech we've seen.”

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We are excited to be joining the Atticus team on this journey. Learn more about the company or request a demo here.

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