Legal Monster

GDPR and the broader trends towards digital/online legislation do not only affect tech giants such as Facebook, Google, and Airbnb. It also substantially raises the entry barriers towards doing business for any small- or medium-sized company that interacts with its customers online. There is increased exposure to substantial fines, not to mention the administrative burden and impact of constantly changing legislation. Moreover and sometimes overlooked, being too compliant can mean leaving valuable customer insights on the table. Legal Monster aspires to erase these barriers to success for any SME, by becoming the first fully automated supplier of GDPR compliance as a service software. Their initial focus: webshops. As mentioned, we think GDPR / increased legislation in the online domain will have an impact on virtually all businesses. What this exactly means, compliance-wise and in terms of legal exposure, has yet to clear itself up. As Such, the market of GDPR / online legislation compliance poses a great opportunity to build a solution for a large, undefined market – henQ’s sweet spot. To tap into this opportunity, Legal Monster has experience of both high quality and relevance. The founding team consists of former senior Trustpilot team members with backgrounds ranging from product and sales to legal and compliance. As such, they have both a very strong legal background and knowledge of what GDPR compliance really is, as well as deep knowledge when it comes to scaling a business. In their ambition to become the leader in GDPR compliance for SME’s, the Legal Monster team was drawn to henQ’s commercial B2B SaaS expertise, as well as our highly pragmatic approach to both deal-making and board membership. In terms of commercial expertise, henQ introduced Legal Monster to a number of henQ’s “sales lieutenants” (henQ affiliated experts who help companies on a project basis) and interviewed candidates for their most important sales vacancies. More generally, henQ helps Legal Monster keep a keen eye on the required performance on key benchmarks that late seed and Series A investors expect to see in a startup before they invest. In terms of having a pragmatic approach, the deal process with Legal Monster has been a testimony to our ability to focus on the essentials. This has enabled henQ to get on board quickly and focus on adding value. In our support to Legal Monster we try to keep things informal, making it easy for them to pick up the phone when they need us and only focusing on the areas where we really know what we are talking about.