Tom Dunlop, CEO at Summize: Summize is a SaaS solution that essentially makes every interaction with the contracts more efficient. The way I've always thought about when to kind of bring an investment partner has been for different milestones. In the early days, the purpose of that funding was really about establishing a team to create the products. And then as we progressed through, we had additional funding that was all about making the go-to-market more repeatable. And then we've had, you know, for example, the Series A we did to open up the US. So I guess every funding round we've had, we've always had a slightly different view as to what it unlocked. The thing that made Maven stand out to start with, it was the people. I had an instant connection with Jez on the team just because he was a former corporate lawyer, so immediately got the pain we were trying to solve and how we were solving it, which really helped. I think as we really got to know Maven and particularly the variety of funds, I kind of knew there was different expertise we could tap into for every stage of the journey. I've worked in these scale-up businesses before, and you soon realise that what gets you from zero to a million, from one to 10 million, for example, they're very different people, very different skills, a different type of company. So I felt like with Maven, it was a genuine long-term partner with multiple different funds and networks that we could call upon at different stages of the scale-up journey.

Jeremy Thompson, Partner at Maven: What first attracted Maven to Summize was the quality of the management team and the people involved in the business. From the very start, just a really high quality team who'd worked together before and had success in the past in multiple different businesses across the North West. The other thing that really attracted me to Summize was the market and the market dynamics. It's a huge market. It's basically any company in the world that's got an in-house legal team. There's lots of opportunity to automate aspects of it and make lawyers work more efficiently.

TD: I think one of the things we were conscious of was our go-to-market motion. We tried a few different things and what was really good to work with Maven on was they'd seen obviously a number of these in the market. Our average contract value was quite low at the time I remember this being one of the big initiatives we did early on was well if you're going to do a outbound go-to market motion we have to get the average contract value up and I think then we shaped the products to lend itself to increasing how many users we needed for example. And really, that's been a huge catalyst for one, our differentiator in the market, but two, our scale has been the fact that we've been able to increase the average deal size significantly.

JT: The key strategic priorities after we originally invested, number one for a relatively early stage business was sales growth and sales momentum. We brought in some non-exec experience through Steve Klin, who was a kind of sales led CEO, to work with Tom and the team to really accelerate that sales growth across both Europe and the US. Early stage businesses live and die by the sales growth and the other thing that we've always invested in and continue to invest in is the product itself and making sure that it's got defensibility and longevity in a fast-changing world now with AI.

TD: In terms of the business, it's probably unrecognisable from the very early days. I mean, we're now over 100 people across Manchester as our HQ, but then we've got offices in Boston, San Diego, and now about 65% of our revenue is actually from the US. So as a makeup of a business, we've internationalised completely from the early days. 

JT: They've done 100% growth year on year for the last five years. Last year to go from £3 million ARR to over 6 is really impressive.

TD: I get really excited that you know at the moment it's a very transactional market, as in you request legal services probably when something's gone wrong. And I think that tech and AI and what Summize can bring is a much more consumer-focused business where you can consume legal services easily, at an affordable price, and it's a lot more of a easily accessible service than what it was. I think the market can 10x what it currently is in terms of legal services. So to be a player in this market is really exciting.