Shell: Many customers come through TikTok
An employment law platform which has helped 12,000 people bring their own tribunal claims – providing unbundled services – has raised £2m in seed funding, mainly to further develop its use of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI).
Danae Shell, founder and chief executive of Valla, said GenAI could already develop a “hunch” as to what people’s employment claims were really about and pass this on to Valla’s ‘legal coaches’, who are either solicitors or HR professionals.
Ms Shell said people could often run their own employments cases but “struggle to identify in legal terms what has happened to them”.
GenAI could not only summarise documents but develop a “hunch” based on them as to what the claims really were and brief Valla’s coaches.
“The coach can then validate the hunch. Rather than spending time getting up to speed, the coaches can get to the heart of the matter so much faster.”
Ms Shell said GenAI could also take notes of the conversation between worker and coach, which takes place through a video call on the Valla platform, and write a report.
“All the legal professional needs to do is check and revise the report before sending it off, rather than drafting it.
“It’s classic unbundling. It’s important for people to be able to talk to someone with experience of employment law. How can we make it as affordable as possible?”
Valla, which helps people bring employment tribunal claims but does not represent them, charges £225 for a preliminary hearing preparation service from a legal coach, £90 for an hour with a legal coach, £96 for a tribunal claim form and £20 for a grievance letter template, among other services.
Ms Shell said many of its customers found the service through TikTok, where it has 100,000 followers, or YouTube.
The company has a dispersed business model, having expanded from three staff in 2022 to nine across the UK, including chief technology officer Jeff Swan, chief marketing officer Linda Grant and legal technologist Katie Sloan, an employment solicitor who went to a “coding boot camp”.
Valla works with almost 20 legal coaches, who worked flexibly on a self-employed basis. Coaches were “often solicitors, but sometimes not”, the important thing being their experience of employment tribunals.
Valla, which first sought pre-seed funding in 2020, raised £600,000 through crowdfunding early last year via the Seedrs platform, now Republic Europe. It also received a grant of £75,000 last year from Innovate UK, under its ‘women in innovation’ initiative.
Ms Shell said the new money would be used on advertising and PR and on building relationships with insurers and unions, but GenAI was “really what the investment is for”, the aim being to embed GenAI across the whole platform, rather than it being used for just a few products.
The latest funding round was led by venture capital firm Ada Ventures, with Active Partners, Portfolio Ventures, Techstart Ventures and an existing backer, think tank the Resolution Foundation.
Check Warner, founding partner of Ada Ventures, said Valla had “spotted a vast, overlooked market and used emerging technology to create an innovative new solution that was impossible even a few years ago.
“As AI reshapes traditional legal billing models, Valla’s transparent, accessible approach perfectly positions them to become the definitive platform for workplace rights.”
