- Founded in 2018, Orbital Witness are a LegalTech-meets-PropTech startup replacing legacy legal due diligence in property transactions with a legal risk rating.
- The value proposition is simple — help leading law firms significantly accelerate their diligence process and reduce grunt work- “most lawyers didn’t go to law school to do property due diligence”.
About Orbital Witness
Orbital Witness was launched in 2018 by Ed Boulle and Will Pearce, whose mission was to replace this manual legacy with a universal risk rating system for land and property. An Experian for the global real estate industry if you like. They provide a cheaper, faster and reliable alternative to the legacy, costly and time consuming legal due diligence process in property transactions.
Orbital Witness collects and digitises data from sources like the Land Registry and Local Authorities. It applies rules-based and machine learning models to provide an instant view of issues that affect the valuation, liquidity, or intended use of real estate. These models are trained by observing the real questions and process lawyers use to perform due diligence. Given Orbital Witness already counts 4 of the 5 magic law firms as clients, its models are being trained on some of the best real estate lawyers in the world.
Using Orbital Witness, lawyers can compress a two-week process into a matter of seconds. Rather than the traditional method of performing diligence at the end of the process, it is performed at the beginning — when the insights are most valuable. Further, 100% of a potential portfolio can be diligenced rather than the often-used 5%, massively reducing risks.
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Orbital Witness Funding
In 2020, it was announced that Orbital Witness had raised £3.3 million in seed funding.
The round was led by LocalGlobe and Outward VC, with participation from previous investors, including Seedcamp and JLL Spark. It brings Orbital Witness’s total funding to £4.5 million.
Launched with its first customer in September 2018 and now used by numerous large law firms, including four of the five so-called “Magic Circle” firms, Orbital Witness’ long-term vision is to build a “universal risk rating” for real estate.
To do this, the startup is employing machine learning technology that it hopes can mirror the process a lawyer goes through when gathering and checking property information. The idea is to use AI to “predetermine” issues that constitute a potential risk.
