Tidemark Invests in Clio

We are thrilled to announce our latest investment: Clio, the leading Vertical SaaS platform serving the legal industry. The best Vertical SaaS companies make entrepreneurs' lives easier—Clio has done this for hundreds of thousands of lawyers worldwide. 

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Clio embodies everything we have written about in the Vertical SaaS Knowledge Project. The company serves as the core system for legal professionals to manage their day-to-day operations and bring together their teams, clients, and data in one place. Over time, Clio has built more products that extend deeper into its customers' workflows. They have become the control point, which is the most important system. Our customer research reinforced this over and over again. 

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We have been friends and admirers of Clio Founder and CEO Jack Newton for many years, and he’s been an important Tidemark community member. Great companies are envisioned on the scale of decades. Jack has the tenacity and patience to have grinded for over a decade to build his company into a category leader. For several years now, he has been a Tidemark Fellow while also serving as a Board Member for Tidemark’s portfolio company, Karbon. Watching him advise other Vertical SaaS founders in Tidemark’s community has given us even more confidence in his capabilities as a leader. We look forward to working directly with him at Clio.

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There were three specific reasons we got so excited to partner with Clio:

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#1 Category Leadership

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Clio is the clear category leader in legal practice management, with a widely recognized and beloved brand and a significant market share advantage. 

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The team also has nearly two decades of experience working with lawyers and has cultivated a deep understanding of the intricacies of a lawyer’s daily workflow to create software that gets all the details just right—solving the unique pain points of legal professionals. They have built an extensive multi-product suite, each with its own strong customer response.

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Beyond the product’s excellence, the leadership team are also category leaders. The industry considers Jack and his executives to be respected thought leaders in the legal-tech space.

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#2 Secular Tailwinds

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The pandemic accelerated the shift from paper and on-prem software to the cloud. Clio has over a decade of experience helping legal firms improve their tech stack and rode that demand wave perfectly. There are still years of market transition to go, and Clio is ideally positioned to capture that growth. 

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Beyond that, another wave of technology change is coming to legal: AI. As a document—and text-based industry, the legal market presents numerous obvious applications for AI. By already centralizing lawyers' workflows and data sets, Clio is uniquely positioned to drive AI adoption among legal professionals.

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#3 Win, Expand, Extend

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Clio exemplifies all aspects of our Vertical SaaS Knowledge Project. Because its practice management platform is the control point, it has executed a multi-product strategy. So far, it has expanded into payments, supported its customers' growth with a CRM offering, and embedded a document management product into customer workflows.  

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From there, it has started to extend into adjacent market segments, serving the ecosystem surrounding a law firm. We think this company is special enough to eventually become an industry platform, acting as the center point through which all industry participants interact.  

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We are thrilled to join the Clio team as they continue building this game-changing business that supports lawyers worldwide. This team is just getting started!