Matterbee believes the traditional practice management system has had its day. Founded in 2024, the UK startup has built an AI-native platform on Salesforce and Azure that combines matters, documents, CRM, billing, legal accounting and automation in one workspace, with the ambition of transforming practice management from a back-office record keeper into an active participant in legal work. We hear from the founders how they are “moving practice management from a system of record to a system of action.”
How would you describe your company to a friend?
Matterbee is building the next generation of practice management for law firms.
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Traditional practice management systems are very good at recording what lawyers have done: opening matters, storing documents, capturing time and raising bills. Matterbee is designed around a different idea: what if the system could actively help lawyers do the work?
We bring matters, documents, emails, clients, workflows, time, billing, legal accounting, and CRM into one connected workspace, then embed AI and automation throughout it to help teams draft, review, organise, progress and complete legal work.
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Put simply, we’re moving practice management from a system of record to a system of action.
And to a techy?
Matterbee is an AI-native legal practice management platform built on Salesforce and designed to give law firms the kind of technology foundation normally associated with major global enterprises.
That distinction is important.
Rather than building another closed, monolithic legal system that firms eventually outgrow, Matterbee combines our legal-specific application layer with Salesforce’s enterprise-grade cloud platform, configurability, workflow engine, ecosystem and data capabilities. We complement that with Microsoft Azure infrastructure and enterprise AI services.
For law firms, that creates a very different proposition. Workflows, interfaces, automations and data structures can evolve around the firm rather than forcing the firm to adapt to the software. New technologies can be incorporated as they emerge, and AI can operate within the context of the matter rather than being bolted onto the side as another disconnected tool.
The ambition is to give law firms a platform they can keep improving for years, rather than another PMS they need to replace in ten.
When were you founded?
2024
By who?
Matterbee was founded by Grant Ripley, Danny Evans, Craig Malcolm and Andy Evans.
The founding team brings together legal technology, enterprise software, commercialisation and technical product development experience, with a shared belief that the underlying technology used to run law firms is ready for fundamental change.
Who are your key managers/senior execs?
Matterbee continues to be founder-led:
● Grant Ripley, Co-Founder & CEO
● Danny Evans, Co-Founder & Chief Commercial Officer
● Craig Malcolm, Co-Founder & CTO
● Andy Evans, Co-Founder & Chair
Andy previously founded enterprise risk software company Xactium, scaling it internationally before its acquisition by Riskonnect. That experience of building enterprise-grade software and taking it through significant growth has been particularly valuable as we build Matterbee.
Who are your target clients?
We are initially focused on ambitious SME and mid-sized law firms that recognise their practice management system should be doing far more for them.
Many firms are still operating with a traditional PMS at the centre, surrounded by a growing collection of separate systems for CRM, onboarding, documents, automation, AI and other functions. The result is fragmentation, duplicated data and lawyers spending too much time moving information between systems rather than doing legal work.
Matterbee gives those firms an opportunity to consolidate around a modern, connected platform while introducing AI and automation directly into the way work is delivered.
We are particularly interested in firms that don’t simply want to replace their current PMS like-for-like. They want to modernise how the firm operates.
What is your plan (growth strategy)?
Our ambition is to establish Matterbee as one of the defining platforms in the next generation of legal practice management.
We’re approaching that in stages.
The first was proving that a fundamentally different PMS could be built and successfully deployed inside real law firms. We’ve now crossed that threshold, with our first six (going on seven) firms signed, implementing and using Matterbee.
The next phase is about building density in the UK market: winning ambitious SME and mid-market firms, creating an exceptional base of referenceable customers and expanding our partner ecosystem.
Alongside that, we’ll continue investing heavily in the areas where we believe the biggest competitive advantage will emerge: embedded AI, no-code automation, configurable and intelligent legal workflows, connected data and the ability for firms to continuously improve how work gets delivered.
As our customer base, platform and delivery organisation mature, we expect to move progressively further upmarket.
We’re not trying to become another name on a long list of practice management systems. The opportunity is to help define what comes after the traditional PMS.
Key achievements?
The achievement we’re proudest of is turning that vision into a platform law firms can actually run on.
In a relatively short period, we’ve:
● Built a comprehensive practice management platform spanning matters, documents, email, CRM, onboarding, time recording, billing and legal accounting.
● Signed our first group of law firm customers and moved Matterbee into live legal environments.
● Passed the Salesforce Security Review and established Matterbee within the Salesforce partner ecosystem.
● Built sophisticated configurable legal workflows where AI and automation can be embedded throughout the process rather than added as standalone tools.
● Developed a highly automated conveyancing workflow of around 90 process steps, demonstrating how far legal processes can be redesigned when workflow, data and AI operate together.
● Built a library of contextual AI tools that can review documents, extract information, draft communications and support legal work using information held around the matter.
● Launched our integrated legal accounting capability in 2026.
● Secured additional strategic investment to accelerate the next stage of product development and commercial growth.
But perhaps the most important milestone is that we’re no longer demonstrating a hypothetical future of practice management. Law firms are beginning to use it.
Have you received investment?
Yes. Matterbee is backed by Mandashi, the investment company founded by Andy Evans and Sheila Gupta following the successful growth and exit of enterprise software business Xactium.
Mandashi made a further strategic investment in Matterbee in 2026 to accelerate product development, customer success, partnerships and commercial growth.
For us, the value isn’t simply capital. Having investors who have previously built, scaled and exited enterprise software businesses gives Matterbee experience around the table that is directly relevant to what we’re trying to achieve.
The investment amount has not been disclosed.
Have there been any key changes in direction since you were founded?
The core belief hasn’t changed.
We started Matterbee because we believed practice management technology could be dramatically better: more connected, more configurable and easier for people to use.
What has evolved is our view of what a practice management system should actually be responsible for.
Historically, the PMS has primarily been the firm’s system of record. It stores the matter, records time, keeps documents and ultimately helps produce a bill.
With modern AI and automation, we believe that definition is becoming obsolete.
The opportunity now is for the platform to actively participate in the delivery of legal work: reading information, preparing drafts, identifying what needs attention, progressing workflows, triggering actions and helping lawyers complete work more efficiently.
That realisation has pushed Matterbee from being simply a modern alternative to legacy PMS products towards something more ambitious: an AI-native workspace and system of action for the law firm.
We’ve also become increasingly convinced that configurability matters. Technology is changing too quickly for firms to buy rigid systems built around today’s processes and expect them to remain appropriate for the next decade. The winning platforms will be those that can continuously evolve.
What are the key challenges in your market?
The biggest challenge is also the biggest opportunity: legal technology is changing faster than the core systems most firms are running on.
AI has dramatically raised expectations. Law firm leaders are asking how technology can increase capacity, reduce administrative work, improve consistency and transform client service.
But many are trying to achieve that while their core operational platform was designed primarily to store information and record activity.
That creates a fundamental mismatch.
There are also significant practical barriers to change. A PMS sits at the heart of the firm, so replacing one involves migration, integrations, finance, workflows, training and change management. Firms are understandably cautious, particularly when many have lived through difficult technology implementations before.
And then there is AI itself. Giving every lawyer access to a chatbot is relatively easy. Embedding AI safely into the actual delivery of legal work, with the right matter context, governance, auditability and human oversight, is much harder.
That’s where we believe the next major competitive battleground in legal technology will be.
The winners will be the companies with access to the best AI models. Those models will increasingly be available to everyone. The differentiation will come from the platform around the AI: the data it can access, the processes it participates in and how naturally it can help people get work done.
That’s precisely the layer Matterbee is building.
Tell us something people don’t already know about the company?
Our AI assistant, ChatBee, was actually named by the legal community.
Rather than naming it ourselves, we opened the decision up and asked people across the legal sector to suggest and vote on names. ChatBee was the winning suggestion.
There has been one unintended consequence.
Once you’ve called the company Matterbee and your AI assistant ChatBee, people assume every new product needs a bee-related name!