Today marks a huge milestone for the team at Brightflag, the AI-powered legal operations platform, which has been acquired by Wolters Kluwer for €425m.
Congratulations to the entire team at Brightflag, and especially to founders Ian Nolan and Alex Kelly, who have shown exceptional focus and drive throughout this company-building journey.
We first met Ian and Alex in 2016. They both came from legaltech backgrounds and so intimately understood their customer needs. Alongside the strong founder-market-fit, we were incredibly excited by their vision for the product. Building a proprietary set of training data for an AI model is par for the course in 2025, but Brightflag had the foresight to do so back in 2016.
But what really attracted us to this team was their global ambition. Whilst the average time for software companies to expand from Europe to the US is five years, Brightflag established a presence in New York within the first year of operations—a strategic choice that was bold and highly unusual ten years ago. This early expansion meant they were building a product fit for both US and European customers from the very outset, and enabled them to bring on Kevin Cohn as CRO, and Michael Scarpelli as CFO, who greatly strengthened their US operations.
We made our first investment in Brightflag at Seed stage in 2017, alongside Tribal VC. We worked closely with the team in the years that followed—through their Series A (led by Sands Capital) and Series B (led by OnePeak) rounds—with increasing conviction that they were building something great.
Today, Brightflag has established itself as a true category-defining company. As of April 2025, the company is generating €27 million of ARR. Its revenues are approximately 95% recurring in nature and approximately 60% from US customers.
On behalf of Frontline, a huge thank you to all 155 team members at Brightflag and all who have contributed to the success of the company over the past decade. We’re excited to see the product in the hands of many more people in the future — go Team Brightflag!
