ILS seed to automate post-close fund work with side-letter, MFN tracking
This article covers ILS, a legaltech startup, which has raised £2.3m in a seed funding round led by Chicago Ventures to expand ProVision, its platform for automating post-close workflows for private funds lawyers. The funding aims to support law firms and asset managers by centralising side letters and negotiated terms, automating most-favoured-nation elections and other post-close processes to improve consistency, auditability and reporting.
ILS, a legaltech startup, has raised £2.3m in a seed funding round led by Chicago Ventures to build a centralised workflow system for private investment funds lawyers. The cash will be used to expand ProVision, the company’s platform for automating post-close fund work such as side letter management and most-favoured-nation (MFN) election tracking — an area that has seen limited modern tooling to date.
Why it matters
Private funds rely on high-volume, bespoke document processes after a close. Those processes are often manual, error-prone and hard to audit. ILS’s seed raise is notable because it brings venture capital attention to a narrow but high-value legal workflow problem: translating negotiated terms into structured, reusable obligations across matters. For law firms and asset managers handling large fundraises, improvements here can reduce risk and speed client reporting.
Inside the product
ILS’s ProVision platform centralises side letters and related negotiated terms into a single system of record. It converts negotiated terms into structured obligations and elections, generates election forms and automatically tracks MFN elections. According to the company, ProVision processed more than 5,000 side letters across over 450 matters and supported over $150bn of capital in fundraises across the US, UK, EU, Hong Kong, Singapore and the Middle East in 2025.
Customers named include global law firms such as Cleary Gottlieb, Fried, Frank, Goodwin, Paul, Weiss, Proskauer, Ropes & Gray, and Willkie Farr & Gallagher — firms that routinely advise on fund formation and post-close fund administration. The platform is pitched at private funds teams and fund formation practices that need consistent records and faster visibility for client updates.
Who are the investors?
The round was led by Chicago Ventures. The announcement did not list additional participating investors.
In the announcement, Eric Duboe, Partner at Chicago Ventures, said:
ILS is building the workflow system for private funds lawyers, starting with MFN and side-letter automation and expanding into a unified operating platform for funds lawyers and fund formation teams. ProVision’s rapid adoption across leading AmLaw firms, combined with the team’s lawyer-led and highly disciplined approach to AI, uniquely positions the company to define this category. We’re proud to lead this round and partner with the team as they scale globally.
If you're researching potential backers in this space:
- Explore our list of legaltech venture capital firms in the UK
- Browse our directory of legaltech angel investors in the UK
Founder perspective
ILS was founded by Fergus Plant, Jack McCarthy and Stefano Benigni after the founders identified gaps in post-close fund workflows while working in investment funds teams at firms including Goodwin and Proskauer. The company says the product roadmap for 2026 will expand ProVision from MFN and side-letter automation into a broader operating platform for funds lawyers.
In the announcement, Fergus Plant, Co-founder at ILS, said:
We are thrilled to partner with Chicago Ventures, whose deep expertise assisting companies like ours to empower traditional businesses with technology will allow us to take our already substantial growth to another level.
Client-side adopters emphasise practical benefits around consistency and visibility. In the announcement, Conan Hines, Director of Practice Innovation at Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson LLP, said:
What’s been most valuable for us is the operational clarity ProVision brings to a high-volume, high-stakes workflow. It helps us translate side letter negotiations into a structured record we can use across the matter, which improves consistency for our asset management team and creates cleaner visibility when clients need updates fast.
In the announcement, Theresa Spartichino, Director of Practice Technology at Ropes & Gray LLP, said:
ProVision is an important component of our asset management technology at Ropes & Gray. Our teams adopted it quickly, and ILS incorporated attorney feedback to develop features tailored to our needs. We look forward to collaborating on additional workflows in the future.
The bigger picture
The funding highlights growing VC interest in tooling that automates niche but mission-critical parts of the legal value chain. For UK and European private funds, where cross-border documentation and investor-specific terms are common, better post-close tooling can reduce operational friction and support compliance and reporting demands.
This deal also underlines a recurring pattern: lawyer-led startups building productised workflows from domain expertise, then pursuing broad adoption across large law firms and asset managers. As funds and their advisers face increasing pressure to scale operations while containing legal risk, expect more investment in targeted legaltech products that plug into existing matter management stacks.
The round signals continued momentum for legaltech innovation serving fund formation and asset management teams in the UK and Europe, an area likely to attract both local and international investors as demand for automation grows.
They've invested in ILS
Get to know these legaltech investors
Click here for a full list of 7,526+ startup investors in the UK