Three PE firms have bought the entire stake of co-founder Ajay Agrawal in UnitedLex Corporation, a leading legal process outsourcing firm..Three PE firms have bought the entire stake of co-founder Ajay Agrawal in UnitedLex Corporation, a leading legal process outsourcing firm..ET reports, existing investors, Helion Venture Partners and Canaan Partners, along with private equity major Sequoia Capital have together invested Rs. 75.3 crore (approximately $17 million) to pick up Agrawal’s stake in UnitedLex..The three PE firms now hold 18.1 percent stake in the company that has been valued at Rs. 400 crore (approximately $92.5 million)..The Delhi office of Amarchand & Mangaldas advised Ajay Agrawal with a team led by Partner Harry Chawla along with Principal Associate Chandrasekhar Tampi and Associate Gaurav Dayal..The Bangalore office of Indus Law advised the PE firms with a team led by Partner Suneeth Katarki..In 2008, Silicon Valley based Canaan Partners and existing investor Helion Venture had invested $6 million in UnitedLex Series B investment. UnitedLex’s Series A investment was done by Helion in 2007..Last year, UnitedLex had acquired the Legal Process Outsourcing firm LawScribe, based in Los Angeles, California with base operations in New York, Los Angeles and Gurgaon, India..Bar & Bench spoke with Ajay Agrawal on his decision to move on and his new venture..Agrawal has about twenty years of leadership experience as an entrepreneur and corporate lawyer. From 1994-2006, he was a securities law expert in some of the world’s leading firms and investment banks. In October 2006, Agrawal struck out as an entrepreneur and co-founded UnitedLex Corporation in the legal process outsourcing and strategic legal technology space. .Bar & Bench: Why did you decide to sell your stake in UnitedLex and move on?.Ajay Agrawal: I had founded the company about five years ago and in that period it has seen explosive growth. I was responsible in those five years for developing all of its technologies. I also planned the contract and the intellectual property verticals. I was responsible for our development into Europe as well. There were number of responsibilities apart from strategic initiatives at the company. By the time summer of 2010 happened, we were already doing excellent revenue growth within the company and we had hired a lot of good senior management layers. So it was clear by then that the company was no longer dependent on just its founders. It had become mature seasoned company in the industry..Every company has different growth phases so it was also clear that the early growth phase of the company was over and this involved the mature scaling phase. In the mature scaling phase, the innovation led growth is a little bit low..It got me thinking, since my DNA as a person is very strongly tied to innovation, that whether I would want to be moving on and looking at an environment where it was slightly more early stage and more innovation led growth was on the radar. And then I was very fortunate to come in contact with the two people with whom I will be founding my new company with and the timing worked out perfectly. So when I expressed my desire to the company to consider alternative paths, they had requested me six months transition period which started in the beginning of this year. Once the transition was complete we then had very smooth parting of ways..Bar & Bench: Tell us about your new venture..Ajay Agrawal: I am now teaming up with Credit Risk Consultant Hari Baskaran and another senior executive in a multinational bank to launch a new credit risk analytics venture..The new venture is a first of its kind in the Indian market. Even though our knowledge sector is thriving and has moved into number of areas both in finance and law, this particular space which is of risk management for the global payment industry is brand new and nobody in India has tackled this area. It is considered extremely high end and typically it’s very closely managed by the banks and the insurance companies themselves. Broadly speaking the problem of risk falls into three buckets; credit risk management, operations risk management and fraud risk management..My new venture will focus on all three areas but among them our fraud risk offering will be the leading offering in the world from the first day itself. This is because the two people who are co-founding the company with me were the people who almost nineteen years ago in 1992, developed the world’s first fraud offering from within Citibank which is what made Citi the best managed from a risk perspective bank throughout the 1990s in the world. They are bringing with them twenty years of experience in this particular domain. I am bringing with me the knowledge of risk that I have gained as a securities lawyer in Wall Street in the 1990s and together we will be developing these set of offerings for the risk management space..Bar & Bench: What is your view on the LPO market?.Ajay Agrawal: I think the market is definitely entering its mature phase. With the takeover of Pangea3 by Thomson Reuters we will now see very large scale investments happenings within the sector and with those investments we will see much larger engagements happening between service providers and their clients. LPO sector will start resembling the BPO sector in terms of deal size and in terms of impact in the years to come.
Three PE firms have bought the entire stake of co-founder Ajay Agrawal in UnitedLex Corporation, a leading legal process outsourcing firm..Three PE firms have bought the entire stake of co-founder Ajay Agrawal in UnitedLex Corporation, a leading legal process outsourcing firm..ET reports, existing investors, Helion Venture Partners and Canaan Partners, along with private equity major Sequoia Capital have together invested Rs. 75.3 crore (approximately $17 million) to pick up Agrawal’s stake in UnitedLex..The three PE firms now hold 18.1 percent stake in the company that has been valued at Rs. 400 crore (approximately $92.5 million)..The Delhi office of Amarchand & Mangaldas advised Ajay Agrawal with a team led by Partner Harry Chawla along with Principal Associate Chandrasekhar Tampi and Associate Gaurav Dayal..The Bangalore office of Indus Law advised the PE firms with a team led by Partner Suneeth Katarki..In 2008, Silicon Valley based Canaan Partners and existing investor Helion Venture had invested $6 million in UnitedLex Series B investment. UnitedLex’s Series A investment was done by Helion in 2007..Last year, UnitedLex had acquired the Legal Process Outsourcing firm LawScribe, based in Los Angeles, California with base operations in New York, Los Angeles and Gurgaon, India..Bar & Bench spoke with Ajay Agrawal on his decision to move on and his new venture..Agrawal has about twenty years of leadership experience as an entrepreneur and corporate lawyer. From 1994-2006, he was a securities law expert in some of the world’s leading firms and investment banks. In October 2006, Agrawal struck out as an entrepreneur and co-founded UnitedLex Corporation in the legal process outsourcing and strategic legal technology space. .Bar & Bench: Why did you decide to sell your stake in UnitedLex and move on?.Ajay Agrawal: I had founded the company about five years ago and in that period it has seen explosive growth. I was responsible in those five years for developing all of its technologies. I also planned the contract and the intellectual property verticals. I was responsible for our development into Europe as well. There were number of responsibilities apart from strategic initiatives at the company. By the time summer of 2010 happened, we were already doing excellent revenue growth within the company and we had hired a lot of good senior management layers. So it was clear by then that the company was no longer dependent on just its founders. It had become mature seasoned company in the industry..Every company has different growth phases so it was also clear that the early growth phase of the company was over and this involved the mature scaling phase. In the mature scaling phase, the innovation led growth is a little bit low..It got me thinking, since my DNA as a person is very strongly tied to innovation, that whether I would want to be moving on and looking at an environment where it was slightly more early stage and more innovation led growth was on the radar. And then I was very fortunate to come in contact with the two people with whom I will be founding my new company with and the timing worked out perfectly. So when I expressed my desire to the company to consider alternative paths, they had requested me six months transition period which started in the beginning of this year. Once the transition was complete we then had very smooth parting of ways..Bar & Bench: Tell us about your new venture..Ajay Agrawal: I am now teaming up with Credit Risk Consultant Hari Baskaran and another senior executive in a multinational bank to launch a new credit risk analytics venture..The new venture is a first of its kind in the Indian market. Even though our knowledge sector is thriving and has moved into number of areas both in finance and law, this particular space which is of risk management for the global payment industry is brand new and nobody in India has tackled this area. It is considered extremely high end and typically it’s very closely managed by the banks and the insurance companies themselves. Broadly speaking the problem of risk falls into three buckets; credit risk management, operations risk management and fraud risk management..My new venture will focus on all three areas but among them our fraud risk offering will be the leading offering in the world from the first day itself. This is because the two people who are co-founding the company with me were the people who almost nineteen years ago in 1992, developed the world’s first fraud offering from within Citibank which is what made Citi the best managed from a risk perspective bank throughout the 1990s in the world. They are bringing with them twenty years of experience in this particular domain. I am bringing with me the knowledge of risk that I have gained as a securities lawyer in Wall Street in the 1990s and together we will be developing these set of offerings for the risk management space..Bar & Bench: What is your view on the LPO market?.Ajay Agrawal: I think the market is definitely entering its mature phase. With the takeover of Pangea3 by Thomson Reuters we will now see very large scale investments happenings within the sector and with those investments we will see much larger engagements happening between service providers and their clients. LPO sector will start resembling the BPO sector in terms of deal size and in terms of impact in the years to come.
