It’s 1am 10 years ago. I’m working on a big sell-side transaction, worth billions. Before I head home, I still need to update the financial model, complete potential buyer profiles, and update the latest analysis of the trading multiples. Instead, I am executing the 34th NDA of the week, frantically trying not to get names and addresses wrong. It’s a repetitive and incredibly boring task. It’s also absolutely vital.
Fast forward to today, and an associate with no coding knowledge uses Bryter’s platform to build a tool that automates the population of hundreds of NDAs — accurately and instantly — pulling the relevant data from legal documents. This app has spread virally through the bank’s departments. The idea came from a colleague in HR down the hall, who last week used Bryter to build a visa application tool to help new joiners with their applications — by asking a series of questions, it determines which visa they should apply for.
Back on the M&A floor, the original buyers of the Bryter platform, the completion process has become easier: companies awaiting clearance from antitrust and competition authorities can use the “Gun Jumping Assessor”, built on Bryter, to understand the obligations they need to fulfil between signing and execution of the transaction.
All of these apps are real examples built by ‘citizen coders’ who couldn’t wait around for stretched IT resources to help them.
Bryter is just two years old, but it’s a game changer. For decades, knowledge workers have sunk time into manual tasks, waiting on IT to introduce tools that will speed things up. Then the software prosumer came along, with people adopting tools for work and home, bringing the likes of Dropbox and Trello into the workplace, all while continuing to build makeshift, unscalable solutions in the likes of Excel. But now, we have entered the no-code paradigm, and Bryter is in the vanguard.
Bryter’s platform means any professional can build apps and automate processes within their organisation — citizens become developers. Its customers include ING, PwC, Deloitte, Baker McKenzie and Taylor Wessing, amongst many others.
Leading the no-code paradigm
When I met the three founding Michaels of Bryter — Michael Grupp, Michael Huebl and Micha-Manuel Bues — I found solidarity in shared experience: both Grupp and Bues had been lawyers, and had anecdotes to rival mine. After years of paperwork and manual processes, they decided to do something about it. Alongside Huebl, the product genius responsible for Bryter’s amazing customer experience, they built a platform that enables anyone in a business — with no coding experience — to develop applications and automate manual processes.
Within the new wave of intelligent automation platforms, Bryter occupies a unique position, combining usability with the power of a sophisticated process and decisioning engine. It is an emerging category and one we believe to be extraordinarily large.
While “no-code” is not entirely novel (arguably Excel was the first generation of no-code and abstraction), the first wave of automation centred on lower-level intelligence in enterprise — simple repetitive tasks or apps built as a front end on top of a database. Bryter goes a step further, offering business users the tool kit to “code” much more complex logic engines — sophisticated processes and decision matrices.
In fact, it is a whole new way to codify, store and share knowledge. As such, Bryter not only helps its customers be more efficient, but it also means that the very application coded on Bryter is a product an enterprise can also sell — it enables businesses to monetise home-grown innovation.
Lawyers at a global law firm told us they used Bryter to code and sell an app that decides if a gig economy worker is a full-time employee or not. The app gives a legally-binding decision with no human involvement. For another Bryter customer, interviewed during our diligence process, one single app had generated a 230% return on investment within just a couple of weeks.
The future can only get Bryter
Behind all of this is the fantastic Bryter team. All three founders bring determination, grit and an immeasurable amount of ambition to the equation — and a winning formula of blending the startup, technology and big law worlds.
Grupp, as well as being a former Hogan Lovells and Freshfields lawyer, also founded and exited two software companies before starting work on Bryter in 2018. Bues was managing director at AI firm Leverton and the founder of the European Legal Tech Association. And Huebl is the former co-founder of ridesharing service flinc, which was sold to Daimler in 2017.
As if past successes weren’t endorsement enough, their ambitious plans to continue conquering the US (aptly named after a strategy in Risk, a board game for which Bryter and Dawn have a shared passion) well and truly had us sold!
At Dawn, we’re excited about automation at scale — the next stage for enterprises across the globe. Bryter is already making this a reality, equipping corporate workers with the tools to transform their knowledge into software and revenue, without any IT resource or coding skills required.
And we believe this is only the tip of the iceberg: the tech behind Bryter’s platform is capable of delivering a multitude of new tools and services to organisations across all sectors, all over the world. So we are hugely looking forward to supporting Byter’s growth and journey ahead, with no doubt the future will only be brighter.
And by the way: Bryter is hiring. If you are looking to join one of the most talented and ambitious teams — with a fantastic culture — and shape how organisations are built in the twenty-first century — search Bryter’s open positions here.
