The Bremen-based legal-tech company Rightmart welcomes another strategic investor on board. With the fresh money, the founders plan to achieve “inorganic growth”.
The founders and managing directors of Rightmart: Jan Frederik Strasmann and Marco Klock (above from left to right) and Dr. Philipp Hammerich, Philipp Harsleben and Sascha Münch (bottom left to right) Rightmart
Sounds like there’s movement in the legal tech market. Key word: exit options. Because: The Bremen start-up Rightmart has closed a Series B financing of an impressive 27.5 million euros. With this money, the company is not planning to increase staff, as is often said in such rounds, in order to be able to develop products faster or to expand internationally, but Rightmart is setting out – among other things – to buy other legal tech start-ups.
Beginning of the consolidation phase
Marco Klock, the founder of Rightmart, speaks of a “consolidation strategy for the consumer rights market”: “The decision to grow inorganically also accelerates the race in this ‘winner takes it all’ market significantly.”
Consumer law – this is what the startup, founded in 2015, focused on. A little bit of the right of the little man. According to Klock, the motto of his company is: “We want to make law accessible to everyone.” That means even for those who cannot actually afford a lawyer.
This is made possible by the fact that Klock and his co-founder Philipp Harsleben want to use technology and digitization to simplify the work of lawyers in small-man cases with Rightmart. Accelerate, make more efficient – and ultimately cheaper. Thanks to a “technological platform,” as the founder explains, his employees can create a “structured database that we use to automate legal processes.” in the future, the “cooperation with partner law firms”, as stated in a statement from the company. “The latter is to be accelerated inorganically on the basis of a roll-up strategy for law firms.” The aim is to “build the largest and best-known law firm brand for consumer law.”
The advocates of little men and women
Rightmart takes care of matters in the areas of tenancy, banking and capital markets, insurance or traffic law. This works best with the increase in efficiency in cases where many people are affected by one and the same injustice at the same time; in the VW diesel scandal, for example. At Wirecard. In the case of incorrect HartzIV notifications and increased health insurance contributions. These are all examples of areas where Rightmart has already excelled. Among other things, the company is the provider of the two platforms Dieselskandal-helfer.de, mehrbuergergeld.de and Hartz4widersprechen.de. “We always represent the little ones against the big ones,” says Klock.
The little ones are also the ones who don’t have legal protection insurance. Basically, you could see Rightmart as a competitor to the providers of such insurance. And maybe they saw it that way themselves, in any case, the legal protection insurer KS/AUXILIA already participated in Series A in February 2022. And now the existing investor went along again, together with the insurance company LVM, also a strategic investor.
read too
Four tips on how startups can still raise money in the current capital crisis