The CriteriaCaixa venture capital manager has sold the stake that the Caixa Capital Tic I fund had in the legal information search platform, v Lex. The stake has been acquired by the Oakley Capital fund, a leading private equity investor in Europe. Caixa Capital Risc and the rest of the minority shareholders have transferred all of their shares in the company. Following the operation, Oakley will be the majority shareholder in vLex with a controlling stake, and the founders will remain as shareholders.
vLex was founded in the year 2000 with the mission of making the search for legal information more accessible and efficient for lawyers and industry professionals around the world. Caixa Capital Risc led the initial round of financing in 2012. Since then, vLex has grown significantly, expanding its client base internationally and launching new products, such as vLex Legal Analytics Vincent AI, an artificial intelligence-based search assistant with coverage global.
Oakley’s investment will enable vLex’s management team to accelerate its strategic goal of build a leader in the fragmented legal information search marketthrough organic growth and M&A.
The co-founder and CEO of vLex, Luis Faushas stated: “We are grateful to the Caixa Capital Risc team who believed in our ambitious company vision and invested in the initial stage, as well as their long-term support since then. Caixa Capital Risc has been an active and helpful investor and has played an essential role in transforming vLex from a idea in a global business. We look forward to a future of company building and collaboration with Oakley. The investment will allow us to grow and continue innovating our product to meet the needs of our customers.”.
Roma Jelinskaite, Principal of Caixa Capital Risc, stated that “vLex is a great example of a European technology company that has built a global business. The team has built an extraordinary and technologically advanced platform that is used by lawyers and legal professionals around the world. We believe that vLex is well positioned to continue its expansion and we are pleased to have been a part of the company’s journey over the past few years, and look forward to seeing the company grow and prosper.”
Fourth operation in 2022
The divestment in vLex joins the various operations carried out by Caixa Capital Risc in recent months, with which it continues its firm commitment to innovative companies and leaders in leading B2B markets, especially in the DeepTech and SaaS segments, such as Industry 4.0 or Cybersecurity, as well as technologies such as Edge Computing or Artificial Intelligence.
An example of this is the entry, in June, into the Portuguese augmented reality startup KIT-AR, through a round of seed financing of 2 million euros. KIT-AR’s solution leverages augmented reality and artificial intelligence to identify, track and reduce errors in industrial production processes.
The company also entered the Spanish startup Barbara IoT last May. With the aim of promoting the digitization of smart networks and cybersecurity, the company has created an operating system to connect and protect industrial equipment with an anti-hacker shield.
