Legal startup Atrium shuts down
Atrium CEO Justin Kan announced that Atrium’s Tech Company will be shut down. Legaltech company Atrium is said to be dismissing its 100 workers and shutting down its operations. The firm has recently stated that some of the $75 million it attracted from investors would be returned.
Kan decided to close the business instead of trudge over it. The stand-alone Atrium law company will continue to run under partners Michel Narganes and Matthew Melville, but the legal software development start-up is ended.
At the beginning of this year, the organization stated that it would restructure its services in order to concentrate primarily on its software goods. The changes reported were dramatic and included the dismissal of the majority of the company’s in-house lawyers.
The three-year-old startup initially had a goal to develop software tools for its in-house law company, that could then provide startups with more effective legal services. It also envisioned bundling these machine-learning software tools to market to law firms in the future. And that vision enabled the company to collect $60 million to the Series B investment fund supported by Andreessen Horowitz.
Atrium founder and CEO Justin Kan is better recognized as the creator of modern live-streaming platform Twitch, which sold around $1 billion to Amazon in 2014. Yet his second act as the operator of legal services and software start-up struggled to execute on his original pledge to transform the legal services sector.
“I’m really grateful to the customers and the team members who came along with me and our investors. It’s unfortunate that this wasn’t the outcome that we wanted but we’re thankful to everyone that came with us on the journey,” said Kan. “We decided to call it and wind down the startup operations. There will be some capital returned to investors post wind-down,” Kan said.
Atrium’s implosion might send ripples across the legal tech industry and force many entrepreneurs to launch a more centered, software-only approach.