Canadian legal tech company Themis Solutions Inc., better known as Clio, has closed a US$500 million funding round that boosts the Burnaby, B.C.-headquartered company’s valuation to US$5 billion as the market for artificial intelligence-powered legal technology heats up.
Clio, which sells cloud-based management software for law firms, also announced the completion of its US$1 billion acquisition of vLex, which has a global database of more than one billion legal documents and an AI tool that helps legal professionals research cases and draft legal documents and arguments, among other features. Clio acquired legal case management software firm ShareDo in March.
“This is a defining moment for Clio and for the legal industry,” said founder and chief executive Jack Newton in a statement. “With vLex now part of Clio … we are combining the best minds and best tools to build the world’s most powerful legal intelligence platform,” he said.
Clio’s latest Series G fundraise was led by U.S. venture capital firm New Enterprise Associates LLC, and included participation from other current investors including Technology Crossover Ventures, Goldman Sachs Asset Management, Sixth Street Partners LLC and JMI Equity.
The new integrations and fresh funds will help cement Clio’s position as an AI-first, one-stop shop for law firms and in-house legal teams, Newton said.
The CEO said that Clio’s legal AI assistant, named Vincent and developed by vLex, gives it a competitive edge because it is grounded in legal documents and not trained on the open web, like many foundational AI models.
“When Vincent reasons or answers your legal research question, or helps you craft a document or an argument, it’s able to ground all that on the most comprehensive legal database in the world and cite the authorities it’s leveraging,” Newton said.
Over the last few years, Clio has prioritized expanding its international footprint and has experienced “huge growth” in Asia-Pacific (APAC) and “a lot of success” in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, particularly in Ireland and the U.K., he said.
“We also see Australia, New Zealand and the broader APAC market as a very tech-forward geography … that is hungry for innovative technologies,” Newton said. The majority of its current clients are U.S.-based.
More recently, Clio has started targeting major multinational law firms and the in-house teams of Fortune 500 companies, Newton said. Founded in 2008, the company has traditionally serviced small-to-medium-sized clients with less than 200 employees.
The company has seen its client base double to 300,000 users in 130 countries and its annual recurring revenue jump 60 per cent to US$400 million from US$250 million from 2024 to 2025.
As it pursues these goals, Newton said that Clio is “hiring aggressively … to support our international and enterprise expansion.” The company currently has hundreds of open roles that span engineering and product management to sales and customer service jobs. Clio employs more than 2,000 staff, with the majority located in Canada and the U.S., and others in the U.K., Ireland and Australia.
“We’re continuing to hire new roles in every function as fast as we can,” Newton said.
Lawyers have been quick to integrate AI into their workflows, with a 2024 Clio survey finding that 79 per cent of legal professionals now use the tech in their daily work, compared with 19 per cent in 2023. Meanwhile, 50 per cent of law firms said that exploring and implementing AI in their work was their highest priority, according to a 2024 Thomson Reuters report.
The embrace of AI by the legal sector has translated into a funding boom, with legal tech startups raising US$4.3 billion this year, a 54 per cent jump from 2024 and well past the US$1.2 billion raised in 2023. In October, California-headquartered legal AI tech startup Counsel AI Corp., also known as Harvey, opened its first Canadian office in Toronto as it expands worldwide.