Legaltech startup Orbital Witness scores £3.3M to create a ‘universal risk rating’ for real estate

Orbital Witness, a U.K.-based legaltech startup developing “AI-powered” software to transform the £4 billion U.K. property due diligence market, has raised £3.3 million in seed funding.

The round is led by LocalGlobe and Outward VC, with participation from previous investors, including Seedcamp and JLL Spark. It brings Orbital Witness’s total funding to £4.5 million.

Launched with its first customer in September 2018 and now used by numerous large law firms, including four of the five so-called “Magic Circle” firms, Orbital Witness’ long-term vision is to build a “universal risk rating” for real estate. “Think of a credit risk check for land and property,” Orbital Witness co-founder and COO Will Pearce tells me.

To do this, the startup is employing machine learning technology that it hopes can mirror the process a lawyer goes through when gathering and checking property information. The idea is to use AI to “predetermine” issues that constitute a potential risk.

“Our technology is adept at trawling through and extracting key issues from the wide range of sources that a property lawyer considers, including HM Land Registry and local authorities,” explains Pearce. “For example, a user is alerted to third party rights, charges and restrictions that might block a sale. In our current state of product development, this allows Orbital Witness to act as an ‘early warning system’ for property lawyers”.

Zooming out further, Pearce says real estate is the world’s largest asset class, but that the process of recording and reporting on property rights has not materially changed in 150 years. This sees real estate lawyers having to manually collect and review information from an array of disparate sources, which can often take weeks to arrive before they can even start. Meanwhile, the various real estate stakeholders — from banks making lending decisions, large commercial real estate PE funds, to residential homebuyers — can’t sign off transactions until the lawyers have completed their due diligence.

“Anyone who has ever bought a home will appreciate the frustrations of dealing with this legal due diligence process, and in commercial real estate, where Orbital Witness is initially focussed, many of these problems are amplified,” says Pearce.

The longer term plan is to ingest a broader range of data, so that Orbital Witness can eventually become trusted to provide a universal risk rating for real estate. This will see its risk modelling solutions wired to also include geographic information (e.g. flood risk), privately held information that can be uploaded to the platform (e.g. rights of lights reports), and also non-legal information (e.g. financial data from public records and ratings agencies).

Adds the Orbital Witness co-founder: “Very importantly, risk in real estate is dependent on the context of a transaction. For a real estate investor purchasing a block of flats, they are interested in understanding the security of rental income derived from the leaseholds. However, a property developer transacting on the same building, may be more interested in any hidden covenants that could prevent the ability to build or redevelop the site”.