Skip Capital has led a $10.84 million initial capital raising by Melbourne fact-checking software company Atticus.
Blackbird Ventures was also a substantial investor in the round.
Atticus launched its first product in 2018 and the business has been profitable ever since.
The company’s software is used by large companies and law firms as a verification tool for important facts, such as figures in annual reports.
According to Blackbird partner Nick Crocker, Atticus makes it easy to verify regulated documents – quickly, collaboratively and securely. The software significantly reduces the risk of accidentally publishing mistakes in regulated disclosure documents while achieving time savings of as much as 60%.
Atticus was founded by software engineers Mitchell Brunton and Misha Wakerman along with lawyer Saul Wakerman, Misha’s brother who is chief operating officer. Chief executive Thom Mackey, who had been a key adviser, was later brought in to lead the business as chief executive.
Brunton and Misha Wakerman worked with Mackey at US data technology company Palantir. Mackey later took on the role as chief operating officer at medical practice management software company HotDoc where he oversaw roll-out of the company’s COVID vaccine bookings initiative.
The idea for Atticus’ software came from Saul Wakerman. Working at law firm Hall & Wilcox, he spent a lot of time manually verifying facts in prospectus documents and wondered why there was not a software platform to simplify the task.
Misha Wakerman and Brunton took up the challenge, built an initial viable product and have continued to work on improving the software ever since.
Today, 70% of the company’s customers are large companies, including BHP, Commonwealth Bank, Wesfarmers, South 32 and Dexus while the remainder are law firms.
Misha Wakerman said Atticus initially sought to streamline the verification of IPO prospectuses for capital markets lawyers. The team was surprised when these users quickly started using the platform for other documents, revealing a broader need and a significantly larger market. Then, clients of the law firm customers began approaching Atticus directly asking if they could use the platform to verify annual report material and much more.
The company onboarded its first UK subscription customer in 2020 and now employs a team of 30 people distributed around the globe. For the future, the Atticus team see their platform being expanded progressively into new spaces and larger markets.
Misha Wakerman said they recognised this would require rapid scaling up so they decided to seek capital alongside relevant experience to achieve that.
The capital raising values the business at more than $80 million.
Image: The Atticus team, Misha Wakerman, Saul Wakerman, Thom Mackey and Mitchell Brunton.