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Clio CEO and co-founder Jack Newton says the deal for Sliced Bread was the biggest of his company's five acquisitions to date. The Globe and Mail Clio, one of Canada’s largest private technology companies, has made a transformative acquisition that could double its potential market opportunity. The Burnaby, B.
C.-based company, officially named Themis Solutions Inc., said Thursday it had bought Manchester, U.
K.-based Sliced Bread Ltd., known for its Sharedo product.
The deal value wasn’t disclosed but Clio CEO and co-founder Jack Newton said it was the biggest of its five acquisitions to date, which would mean it paid at least several tens of millions of dollars for Sharedo. Clio funded the deal with a combination of cash, debt and equity. Clio sells what it calls an operating system for small to medium-sized law firms.
Its cloud-based software platform is used by firms with 1 to 200 lawyers to manage their practices, including scheduling, bookkeeping, accounting, billing, client onboarding, document and case file management and advertising. About 90 per cent of its 150,000-plus individual users are in the U.S.
With Sharedo, Clio is picking up a cloud-based platform that targets the needs of larger, global law firms with hundreds, even 1,000 or more employees, handling similar workflows. The 14-year-old acquired company has 45-plus clients, primarily in the UK, including DLA Piper, Linklaters and Herbert Smith Freehills, and is used by more than 13,000 individuals. Sharedo, founded and led by former consultants Ben Nicholson and Nick Humphrey, is largely self-funded and is, like Clio, profitable.
It has more than 70 employees to Clio’s 1,400. Like many software startups it began as a computing services provider that morphed into a product company, after building a custom case management system for a U.K.
law firm in 2013. Clio is following other software platform providers including ServiceNow Inc., Toast Inc.
and Canada’s Shopify Inc. that started out serving smaller operations within their markets before expanding to appeal to larger enterprises. Mr.
Newton said Clio’s original plan had been to pursue that strategy three to five years from now, but after meeting Sharedo’s founders last fall, “we saw the opportunity to pull that roadmap ahead by a number of years.” After winning a competitive process to buy Sharedo, “overnight, we have a solid and capable platform” to serve legal giants, he said. Mr.
Newton said Sharedo’s platform is more customizable to meet the needs of large, complex firms, and can take months to put into service, compared to Clio’s more standardized and easily implemented platform. Mr. Newton said Sharedo is also “very extensible” to handle the increasing amount of artificial intelligence-powered tools lawyers are using for a range of tasks.
“This is a brand new and exciting frontier for us,” he said. “For the first time Clio can say that it is a full spectrum technology provider for firms of all sizes.” Clio, which generates more than US$250-million in annual revenue from its 150,000-plus legal users, could “double our more our current size with the incremental opportunity that is available” serving hundreds of large firms globally, Mr.
Newton said. The acquisition expands its reach across the Atlantic, but the big play is to offer Sharedo in the U.S.
, where Clio does 90 per cent of its business. Mr. Newton said Clio would announce its launch customers in North America this year.
Clio is among an elite group of Canadian startups that have grown into sizeable companies by selling subscription software to operators in specific markets, or verticals; it is also one of at least 71 Canadian private tech companies with US$100-million or more in annual revenue . Clio has also taken on greater profile as one of Vancouver’s elite tech companies, inking a recent multi-year sponsorship of the Canucks hockey team. Like other big private tech names in Canada such as 1Password, Wealthsimple and StackAdapt , Clio is considered a likely candidate to go public when markets warm up.
Clio last year did a US$900-million secondary financing that saw private capital giant New Enterprise Associates buy out employees and early investors in a deal larger than most Canadian IPOs. Tech sector observers had predicted the IPO market could bloom this year after a prolonged rut, but U.S.
President Donald Trump’s trade wars has roiled markets, dissuading some potential issuers. “All I can say is we’re not in a rush to get out in that environment,” Mr. Newton said.
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