How SeedLegals went from Seed stage to global scale with Wise Business

SeedLegals’ founders Anthony Rose and Laurent Laffy had very different career paths. Anthony was a serial entrepreneur and Laurent, an ex-venture capitalist, but they had one thing in common — they were frustrated with high legal fees and lengthy negotiation times faced by ambitious startups during the fundraising process.

“I used to head up BBC iPlayer, then I built two startups and sold them, and even invested in a few. Along the way, I just got tired of paying lawyers. When I met my co-founder Laurent, we got together to build a platform that makes it way easier and more affordable for founders to build their businesses,” said Anthony.

Today, the pair run the world’s first platform that lets founders and investors easily create, negotiate and sign all the legal agreements they need to do a funding round. In fact, the business now closes more funding rounds in the UK than anyone else.

About Wise Business x SeedLegals: Wise Business has partnered with SeedLegals, the one-stop platform for the legals you need to get funded and grow your business, to offer exclusive benefits to SeedLegals customers. Find out more at SeedLegals.

“We take an age-old problem, A and B parties want to make a contract, but instead of having to pay lots of money to lawyers to send documents back and forth, you get an easy-to-use platform.”

Despite their years of experience launching, scaling and investing in businesses, taking SeedLegals to the next level hasn’t been easy — especially once they set their sights overseas. But the rapid growth in founders adopting and relying on the SeedLegals platform has enabled them to grow to over 160 employees based across the UK and France and now, increasingly, in the US.

Taking the idea global

Over the past seven years, SeedLegals has made massive strides.

“We’re delighted that SeedLegal’s has been going brilliantly and now, a majority of UK startups are on the platform. From a business perspective, it’s fantastic but it also means there's an inherent limit to our growth,” said Anthony.

This left him and his team with a few choices. “Do we sell more to your current customer base? Do we move into adjacent product spaces, or do we move into new countries?” Anthony wondered. Once they realised that the technical effort of expanding to a small country would be the same as to a big country, they figured they would take a leap for a big one: the US.

Last year, over 13,750 venture capital deals were closed by startups in the US at a total deal value of over 209 billion USD.

Unsurprisingly, expansion doesn’t come without its challenges.

“When I get on a plane and go to New York, it's like going back in time seven years. Startups don’t know SeedLegals,” said Anthony. Plus, their target audience in the US wants different things than the businesses they work with in the UK and Europe. “In the US, the legal documents are different. People want different solutions. Many things we built in the UK aren't applicable in the US. So our challenge now is learning how to build something we can sell quickly, ideally before spending years working on a complete product suite and then realising nobody wanted it, or our competitors already had it.”

Ensuring that doesn’t happen means that Anthony has to spend a lot of his time across the pond.

“It’s often said that the best way and fastest way to get product market fit is for the CEO to get on a plane and go and move there, which is exactly what I did. I now spend my days talking to customers, finding out what they want, looking at what the competition is doing, and seeing how we can create a differentiated and successful product.”

Luckily, Anthony now has “the advantage of 160 people and a mature platform in the UK” on his side. Still, the growth feels reminiscent of SeedLegals’ earliest days. Anthony notes, “In a lot of ways, we’re having to start over again. It's exhilarating and slightly scary, but I wouldn't have it any other way.”

Less time on admin, more time on growth

This process of relaunching in a new market means less time to handle the daily tasks that come with running a business. In other words, the less time spent on admin, the better.

For Anthony, Wise Business offers the perfect solution. “For me personally, Wise was amazing but now with SeedLegals, particularly with global customers and the fact that I’m spending a lot of time in the US, Wise Business is fantastic.”

This is particularly true as his business scales. “We have developers, employees and consultants in other countries that we need to pay and we can process all of the payments at the same time via a single CSV file. Plus, it’s easy for customers abroad to pay us. It’s nice to have one solution for all of these FX needs. Especially a solution that we trust not to fleece us on cross-currency payments.”

Anthony puts his Wise Business account to the test on a daily basis — especially when he’s in New York. “When I get on the subway and it's $2.90 and I tap in with my Wise Business card, I know I'm going to pay $2.90 not $2.90 and a £5 processing fee with 20% overhead.”

Beyond saving money, Wise Business enables Anthony to share the financial workload with his team. “Our team can access our accounts and the app is so intuitive to use compared to high street banks. Plus, integration with software like Xero and QuickBooks is really easy.”

By streamlining his business’ international financial admin, Anthony has more time for him to focus on what truly matters. “When you're building a company, you want to spend as much time on your product and as little time and money on everything else as you can.” With Wise Business, he and his team don’t have to worry about FX risk, exorbitant cross-currency fees, processing their international payroll or managing multiple bank accounts in different countries. Instead, they can manage all of their money in one easy-to-use platform, anytime and from anywhere.

Tips and tricks from a serial entrepreneur

It’s not everyday that we get the opportunity to speak to a serial entrepreneur like Anthony and we’d be remiss to leave you without some of his tips and tricks for scaling startups.

His number one tip for founders? “Validate it before you build it.” That way, businesses can avoid lackluster market impact after they’ve invested time and money into building their product. Anthony says “making mock ups” can make all the difference. “Once upon a time, it was hard making mock ups but these days, with Figma, Canva, Lovable and Cursor, you can make something that actually works.”

The next step is testing it. “Go and show somebody, and if they say, ‘I don't understand this,’ or ‘I'm not going to use that,’ or I've seen three of these already,’ that's a good sign that you need to rework your idea. If they can't understand your product at all, you should iterate your messaging. Keep testing your ideas and validating them before you fully build your business.”

Anthony is following these steps himself as he scales SeedLegals to the US. And while the process won’t be straightforward, he and his team are ready for the challenge.

In the same way that SeedLegals makes it easier for founders to focus on their business and not their legals, Wise Business empowers founders like Anthony to grow internationally with transparent fees, fast cross-currency transfers and solutions that streamline their financial admin globally.

Want to learn more about Anthony’s story? Watch here.

Learn more about Wise Business