A pair of childhood friends have raised €10 million (£8.5 million) from a London venture capital fund to bring their legal tech to the UK.

Kira Unger and Olga Beck-Friis, Swedish friends since the age of 7, have raised the cash from Atomico, one of the capital’s best known tech investors.

The pair, a former lawyer and management consultant, launched startup PocketLaw in 2020 after being shocked at a lack of innovation in the legal sector.

Their technology speeds up the process of creating legal contracts by digitising work that would otherwise be done manually.

Beck-Friis said: “We’re now seeing a shift, boosted by Covid, of improved level of adoption of digital ways of working at companies.

“We strongly believe in the future every company will have a digital legal service and we are determined to be the leading business in this space.”

The company began operations in the UK in August 2021 with a team of 10 employees in London. The UK generates 25% of the company’s sales, but the pair hope to ramp UK sales up to 50% by 2023 to become the company’s biggest market.

Beck-Friis said: “We are so excited with this new capital injection to scale up in the UK.”

Atomico Partner Ben Blume said: “Kira and Olga have built an amazing team at PocketLaw, bringing world class commercial, legal and technical experience from Slack, LinkedIn, Google, Zalando, KRY, Spotify, Acast, Mannheimer Swartling and Hogan Lovells.

“They are all aligned around the belief that businesses can alleviate huge burdens by making everyday legal more intuitive and efficient - lessening cost, risk, and wasted time in the process.”

The pair were able to complete the investment round without difficulty, but Beck-Friis acknowledged a bias against women among tech investors -- a noted problem in the industry.

“In the VC world, especially early on, people are raising insane amounts of money just on a piece of paper and we’ve had to prove ourselves before being able to raise that money, and I think that would be different if you talk to a male counterpart,” she said.

“We’ve had to really show in the numbers that we have succeeded and we’ve seen progression.”