The Backstory of Cavalry x BRYTER
by Rouven Dresselhaus & Martin Janicki
We are sure that the future is BRYTER, but sometimes, looking at the past can also be enlightening. Here is the story of how BRYTER and Cavalry came together.
How it all began
Rouven and Michael Grupp, the CEO of BRYTER, met already in 2014. At that time, Michael had just left his job at a law firm and was working on his startup Lexalgo, one of the early legal tech companies. It was already obvious at the time that Michael brings a passion for disrupting legal processes that is second to none, but in 2014 the professional service industry was not touched by automation a lot. Michael kept Lexalgo as an agency through all the years and went into building another company he later sold.
Four years later, in mid-2018, an angel from our network pointed us towards a young start-up called Ryter. At a conference, Rouven met with one of the founders, the CSO Micha Bues.
Our first impression was that of an outstanding expert with an incredibly exciting idea: Automating decisions and expert knowledge in compliance with applicable rules and the individual requirements of the client. A decisioning workflow that is powerful and can be used universally yet does not require any coding skills to build. But the meeting was not only a surprise in terms of technical approach and business model — it turned out that Micha Bues had teamed up with Michael Grupp to now bring to market what had already been stewing since 2014: Automation for professional services.
The team is perfectly complemented by the third Michael: Michael Hübl, who is an absolute CPO and CTO superstar (yes, actually both) in his own right. As the founder of the mobile ridesharing app “flinc” he had already solved a key problem: connecting thousands of people on their way to work, with the magic of a great UX on small screen. Of course, we had heard of the sale to Daimler, so it was the third surprise to meet the founder in person — as the third M.
After meeting the three together in the summer of 2018 it was clear that they were on a path to something great — and thus began the joint journey of BRYTER and Cavalry.
A founding team of experts
Michael Grupp is a lawyer by trade with an academic focus on IT and data legal topics. He practiced law at multiple large corporate law firms such as Freshfields, Hogan Lovell and Clifford Chance. As a former founder of Lexalgo, he brought extensive start-up experience.
Micha Bues is a lawyer by trade as well, with an LL.M. from Oxford and a PhD from the University of Cologne. After five years of law practice, Micha shifted towards business roles and became an active and well-respected member of the legal tech community.
Michael Hübl complemented the team with his tech expertise having previously co-founded, led and sold flinc to Daimler as the CPO.
The beauty of abstraction
As software is eating the world and the wave of digitalisation turns one industry after another upside down, processes in the legal profession are somewhat of an obvious target, particularly to a team led by former lawyers. Consequently, we were impressed when one of the very first statements by the founders was that the term “legaltech” is much too narrow to encapsulate the vision behind BRYTER.
Any type of expert work can be abstracted into the application of rules and weighting of factors. The ultimate proof is any question ever that has been answered with “it depends” — you have been there yourself. In that sense, BRYTER is about structuring and digitising the application of knowledge to turbo charge the work of expert workers, without the loss of fidelity, judgement and ultimately control.
BRYTER is special because it manages to strike two types of balances like no other product in the market. First, their platform is universally powerful yet easy to use, hence relevant for day-to-day module creation and truly democratising. Second, it manages to meaningfully automate processes while keeping the human in-the-loop at all critical junctures, thereby pushing automation into non-trivial workflows.
The underlying philosophy behind this approach has been baked into BRYTER from the very beginning and will continue to materialise further for many years to come.
Large law firms such as Gleiss Lutz, Baker McKenzie and Paul Hastings, consultancies such as PwC, KPMG and Deloitte as well as corporates such as McDonald’s, Telefonica and GEA trust BRYTER to facilitate their processes.
Today, BRYTER announces their Series B in the amount of $ 66 million. The investment round was led by New York based investment firm Tiger Global, with participation from existing investors Accel, Dawn Capital, Notion Capital and Cavalry Ventures.
We at Cavalry are thrilled to continue to support the three Michaels on their exciting and truly disruptive journey. Congratulations on a fantastic Series B, guys!
P.S.: Obviously it’s convenient to post this type of content in lieu of a funding round, but we had a warm fuzzy feeling about these guys right from the start, ever since the three Michaels did their first management offsite at a place called Michelstadt. You can’t make this stuff up.
