Visual intelligence and corporate diagramming platform Jigsaw is set to move into the end-to-end entity management arena, leveraging its relationships with entities across every stage of a deal, from law firms to corporate and financial institution customers, we can reveal.
Founded in the UK in 2020 by former investment funds lawyer Stephen Scanlan and former magic circle lawyer-turned-banker Travis Leon, Jigsaw, helps lawyers to visualise transactions and has also evolved into a project management tool. It raised a $15m Series A in 2024.
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While its revenue still largely comes from the legal sector, in recent years it has expanded into working with accountancy firms, notching up relationships with all ten of the top 10 firms, including the ‘Big Four’. That in turn has led to working with large corporate customers of both of those verticals.
Speaking to Legal IT Insider about the genesis of the entity management concept, Scanlan said that clients of Jigsaw’s clients “started receiving our diagrams and our steps papers, so a major corporate would get a diagram from our client, Gibson Dunn, for example. And they’ll say, ‘well, that’s interesting. Where do you get that? What can we do with it? Can we put data behind it?’”
As a result, for the past circa year and a half, Jigsaw has been growing its corporate and financial institutions customers and Scanlan said: “They came to us and said, ‘you’ve historically been great at the modelling side, the blueprinting side, but what could a corporate structure look like? What could the entities look like in terms of if I want to make a fund launch or I want to do a corporate restructure?’
“What they wanted was for that transaction, once it had been modelled, to become a living reality. They wanted to then maintain the corporate structure chart as an entity management system that itself embedded data.”
While very few law firms use entity management software, most corporates do and Scanlan says: “They are looking for a tool that can become one platform across each vertical. So there’s the client side, the corporate financial institution side, where they want to maintain and track and do compliance and KYC and filing dates on the living structure. But they also want their advisors, whether that’s a law firm or a Big Four or beyond, to come in and do the modelling and the drafting of proposed structures.
“That’s a virtuous ecosystem where they don’t want to have some teams in Excel, some teams in Athennian, some teams in PowerPoint, some teams in Jigsaw, some teams in some of our competitors. They want one tool where the whole entity lifecycle management and ELM, entity life cycle management, is the platform that we are launching.”
It’s very early days in terms of product development but Scanlan says the demand is there and so is the rare access to all buyers across the deal cycle.
“As of today, we are really uniquely positioned to make this play because no one else has a distribution across the law firms and the Big Four and the product capabilities on both the modelling and the data side.”
While there are enormous entity management players in the market, Scanlan says: “They have zero legal clients. So that means that they can’t get that cycle working, that entity life cycle working.”
In terms of governance and ensuring that firms only access the matters they are working on, Scanlan says: “We have very, very detailed permissions control. So if you are a big private equity house and you are the relevant administrator, you see everything. You see your panel of 40 law firms. From your perspective, you don’t really care where the modelling has come from, as long as you can aggregate it into your one big bucket. What you don’t want is other law firms seeing other law firms deals with proposals. So that firewalling is a very core part of the product.”
He adds: “From the corporate side, it’s actually a benefit that you can finally have all your advisors in one place as opposed to all your advisors sending you PowerPoint or PDF files from time to time, which you then have to manually update your records with. It’s all just there.”
Scanlan says Jigsaw has signed up four large design partners to start work in September.
“We’re not the biggest company or the most profitable company or the fastest growing company, but weirdly, we are the only company in the world that can do this product this year,” he says.