Our Investment in SingleFile

We are pleased to announce Foundry Group’s investment in SingleFile. Based in Seattle, WA, SingleFile simplifies and automates state and local compliance activities for companies and their service providers. The company’s first offering is an enterprise product for law firms to manage registered agent services, including formation, state qualification, and related filings with government agencies. 

There are over 30 million companies in the U.S. and 1.1 million of them do business in three or more states. Each quarter, over 75,000 new companies are formed. They all have one thing in common: a registered agent and a compliance headache. Any given company, especially those that do business in several states, might have over 100 filings to deal with each year, all with different government agencies. Today, this is an extremely manual, time-consuming, and confusing process. And there can be serious consequences for getting it wrong. Law firms like the one at www.sambrotman.com often take on the burden of managing this compliance and the registered agent relationships, but would much prefer to have paralegals and junior attorneys spending time on substantive tasks for their clients. Many can’t or won’t bill clients for this work.

State and local filings present a $7 billion market ($2 billion in registered agent services alone plus another $5 billion in other state and local compliance filings). The dominant providers in the registered agent market are archaic yet very profitable. They offer little to no technology, are inefficient and disorganized, and are constantly making mistakes both with the filings themselves and in billing services and transaction fees to clients. While other compliance is supported by professional service providers, there are no good technology options. Speak with any corporate lawyer and they’ll shake their head when you bring up this topic. 

SingleFile is building an innovative, tech-first solution to enable companies and their service providers to streamline and manage compliance filings. Customers will be able to automate filings, organize all of their compliance data in one place, and stay on top of filing deadlines to avoid expensive penalties. SingleFile provides not only the registered agent services but also a user-friendly, intuitive software layer to help service providers and their clients easily manage their compliance activities.

SingleFile fits in our Glue theme, automating processes, data management, and communication with multiple, disparate parties through software.

We met SingleFile through our friends at Pioneer Square Labs (PSL) in Seattle, where we’re an investor in both the PSL Studio and the PSL Venture fund. SingleFile was formed in the PSL Studio in collaboration with co-founders Sean Flynn (CEO) and Matt Woodward (CTO). As investors (and, a few of us, as lawyers), we’ve felt the registration and compliance pain points first hand. We were excited by the huge opportunity to bring the first technology solution to a real problem faced by every single company in the U.S. We love companies that disrupt old, archaic industries and are excited to partner with SingleFile and PSL as they bring tech to the world of registered agents and compliance services.

You can read more about SingleFile and the financing here.