There are a bunch of topics I wanted to write to you about including my friend Casey Flaherty’s piece in LegalEv (I have questions) or #bitcoin hitting an all time high (I am long BTC) but as the subject of this email suggested, I am instead going to tell you about Marble, the #legaltech unicorn 🦄 🦄 🦄 you’ve never heard of. It’s not like they’ve been around that long (just over a year), so it’s not crazy if you haven’t heard of them.
But, what is absolutely BONKERS is that Marble, which I had never heard of until last week, hit a unicorn valuation ($1.5B according to Israeli news site “The Marker”) in under a year. Valuations can be deceiving (think Premonition.io raising a seed round at $100M valuation) but this valuation appears to be earned. According to one of their investors with whom I spoke, the round was “super competitive.”
The company is quite secretive, but here’s what we know:
Marble Law connects lawyers with clients, like a marketplace / Uber, only with guiding questions making the user experience nice and effortless + flat fees + app that makes it paperless and easy to follow & transparents.
Founders are Rami Lechter and Itay Hirsch. $30M in transactions have been processed through the platform. This round of financing was around $100M at a valuation of $1.5B 🚀 🚀 🚀 led by Insight and Oren Zeev is also involved. For those who may not be familiar, Insight Ventures is one of Israel’s most successful VCs and Oren Zeev whose podcast interview with Harry Stebbings I highly recommend and who is widely considered one of the top investors in Israeli startups along with Gigi Levy and Yossi Vardi.
Well, here is the backstory:
Mid 2020 Lechter left his role at VC StageOne after 3 years of serving as director in a few of their portfolio companies to join Itay who was the CEO of Puls, a marketplace for technicians.
Puls went into a hard patch and they left and started Themis-Tech (now known as Marble Law) with the idea of solving the problem of a client needing to find the right lawyer, similar to the technician type problem that Puls was solving.
By asking the client questions, Marble Law figures out who the right lawyer is for you + gives you much more than that (flat fees, better user experience to follow what’s going on, etc.)
Marble deals with the common practices like DUI, employment, bankruptcy law, family law etc. Marble hired a law firm, but also enables other lawyers to work through them like an Uber for legal. They have one consumer app and one app for lawyers (I’ve downloaded both)
Now, has this been tried before? Of course it has, but the Legaltech Cemetary is littered with the graves of “Uber for Legals” like Lawdingo. None of them found a model that worked, apparently till now. Client reviews like the case of dealing with immigration paperwork processes show that the service is averagely priced but the user experience is incredibly positive. Marble is employs a team of 65 according to LinkedIn, with 12 openings. Not bad for a 🦄 company!
A few takeaways:
To think, Uber for Legal may have been a real possibility all along but for better UI. Wish I had thought of that 🤦♂️ It will be fascinating to figure out what other factors besides tech have made this such a smashing success so far. Is it perfect timing? Something else?
As I discussed with Paladin founder Kristen Sonday this week on the Legally Disrupted webinar https://event.on24.com/wcc/r/3427533/1AF5BD67DA57137AEDAB2B83CA5049D1?partnerref=axiomemail access to justice is the biggest opportunity in Legaltech. Make it easier for people to get access to the legal services they need, and you can create an absolute 🚀 If you think that #A2J is some little brother to SaaS that is sold to big law firms and corporate legal departments, then you’re not following companies like Donotpay, Hello Divorce, TermScout, not to mention LegalZoom. NetDocs took over 20 years to get to a billion dollar valuation, Marble gets there in a year 🤯🤯🤯
PR is great, revenue and user growth is better. No one’s heard about Marble and yet they’re are crushing it 💪 💪 💪
Till next Friday, who knows how many more #Legaltech unicorns we’ll discover between now and then.
Great read. thank you for this!
And they didn't have to invent the wheel! Brilliant