Portland legal software startup Tangible Global has been quietly building its product for years, and now a recent acquisition is expected to boost the company’s go-to-market efforts and raise its profile.
Tangible is building software to help corporate legal departments and law firms automate workflow for the mundane recurring transactions and contracts — think routine real estate needs or sourcing — that have to go through legal checks. The platform is built to scale with customer needs so it can handle four or five contracts a month that might be required for a startup all the way up to 400 contracts a month or more needed for an enterprise customer.
In addition to the workflow platform the startup has lawyers on contract that can be tapped on-demand to handle these kinds of transactions.
It was all built based on founder and CEO Robert Reynold’s career at big corporate law firms.
“Every year I would see clients struggle not with the big transactions — the real big ones they know how to address. Where it’s hard is every company has to keep the lights on, it’s corporate infrastructure, real estate, IT sourcing, HR work. All of that work is nuts and bolts of what they do,” he said. “Large (law) firms are set up to handle large transactions, complex transactions. They are less well equipped to handle, at the price and speed (needed), this portfolio of infrastructure transactions.”
Which is where Tangible comes in.
Co-founder and President Denise Barnes, who spent a career in business-to-business marketing, likens the tech and the problem Tangible is solving to what was seen with the rise of marketing automation.
The company’s latest move is the acquisition of London-based Autto. That company is a no-code automation platform that helps users build custom workflows without having to write computer code from the ground up. Tangible built its product using Autto.
Tangible was an early investor in Autto and the two companies had seen an official tie-up as a possible outcome. As a result of the deal the Autto team is joining Tangible and co-founders Ian Gosling will be Tangible’s chief product officer and Krisztian Kerek will be Tangible’s chief technology officer. The Tangible team will now be about 13 full-time employees.
“At our core, Autto is a product company, and we give our customers a toolset to apply technology to service delivery,” said Gosling in a written statement. “Tangible’s vision — to leverage technology to modernize and accelerate legal services — aligns with ours. The widespread availability of new technologies in machine-based language comprehension and generation means the digital transformation of legal, traditionally a laggard industry, is truly upon us.”
Tangible is keeping the Autto brand. That startup was also focused on the legal field so its customers are now Tangible customers, said Barnes. The deal also helps prepare Tangible for the possibility of getting into other functions within its corporate customers.
Tangible has 10 to 15 clients and they range from small businesses to enterprise global brands. The company has been self-funded so far. It launched in 2015 and spent about five years building the workflow and the product. By 2020, Reynolds and the team had the product dialed in.
The company may seek fundraising later this year to boost sales and marketing.
