Downtown-based Steno recently closed a $15 million series B funding round, nearly doubling the company’s total funding to $38.5 million.
Leading the way was Brooklyn-based Left Lane Capital, followed by Vancouver-based Clio, which invested through its investment arm Clio Ventures. Steno — which, with its platform DelayPay defers payments for its court reporting and other support services — said it plans to utilize the new funding to grow its national footprint, develop new service channels for clients and bolster its tech infrastructure.
“Steno has found phenomenal product-market fit with its online legal services marketplace and DelayPay product,” said Jason Fiedler, managing partner at Left Lane Capital. “They are enabling law firms to take on more volume with greater efficiency, and the business is more than doubling market share year over year as a result.”
Co-founded by Greg Hong, Dylan Ruga and Dan Anderson, Steno was conceived as a tool to help law firms defer the costs of litigating a case until its resolution, which is when payouts occur. Ruga, who is an attorney, said many law firms spend most of their cash flow on various case-related expenses, which can prove restrictive for those practices.
“As a plaintiff attorney, I found myself in a spot where all of my working capital was tied up in case costs,” he said in a statement. “I couldn’t grow my business, there were no court reporting agencies that would defer costs until my cases settled, and securing litigation financing was resource-draining for my staff.”
The heavily tech-based company saw growth during the Covid-19 pandemic, which produced a need for remote working options. Steno’s video conferencing system, Steno Connect, took off as a method to collect case depositions during the remote work environment. More recently, the company has also launched concierge e-filing and process serving.
“We realized there was a real solution here to meaningfully improve the way lawyers can operate their firms by offering highly-reliable services underpinned by purpose-built technology and a financing layer,” Hong, the company’s chief executive, said in a statement. “It was a massive opportunity to build a best-in-class service layer in this $17-billion traditionally-analog market.”
