We’re thrilled to announce our investment in Kaveat, a company making contracts understandable for influencers, creatives, and freelancers.
When Dorothee was 17 years old, she was handed a legally-binding and exclusive modeling contract that was roughly 20 pages long. She couldn’t afford a lawyer, meaning she didn’t understand the legal implications or if the contract was equitable. This is a very common scenario, which is becoming even more prevalent with the rise of influencer marketing (there are currently millions of influencers in the US). Brands and agencies often have legal representation in these negotiations, and the lack of legal representation for influencers and creatives can cause an imbalance of information.
Dorothee went on to be a quantitative researcher at NASA and a natural language processing engineer (all while continuing to model), before meeting her co-founders Elizabete and Christine. Elizabete has been a content creator for several years, always negotiating for herself in brand deals. She has a significant advantage because of her legal experience at places like eBay and the EU’s Court of Justice, but she realized that most of her peers in the creative industry lacked legal resources and education. Christine spent time at Capital One as a full-stack software engineer before joining the team. The founders’ combination of legal, technical, and personal experience inspired and equipped them to launch Kaveat.
Kaveat helps influencers and freelancers better understand the contracts they sign. The team has developed software that ingests contracts and provides an easy-to-understand explanation of each relevant clause. Additionally, the app gives users statistics on how likely it is that certain clauses will be negotiable. Kaveat’s mission is to make contracting and negotiating more accessible. Agreements with brands and agencies are pivotal in the careers of creatives, yet these individuals often aren’t able to fully understand what the documents mean due to the highly verbose nature of legalese. By simplifying contracts, Kaveat is putting more information into the hands of individuals and small businesses.
One of The LegalTech Fund’s investment theses is using technology to increase access to legal services. Kaveat’s software enables individuals to better understand their contracts and negotiating position, without having to pay expensive fees to a traditional lawyer, empowering influencers and freelancers to enter into legal agreements with more confidence and understanding. We also have strong conviction in the power of legal data, which Kaveat is leveraging to be at the forefront of setting industry standards and benchmarks for these types of agreements. We have enjoyed getting to know the Kaveat team over the past months, and it was awesome to see them win the Consumer category of the TLTF Summit Startup Showcase!
Please welcome Kaveat to The LegalTech Fund family and let us know if we can connect you to learn more.