How legal tech startup Ranking Copilot found investors for their £1m pre-seed

Ranking Copilot completed its second pre-seed round in August 2026, raising in excess of £500k. Combined with its earlier funding, this brought the total capital raised by the company to more than £1 million. The story started with a very specific problem.

The software behind legal directory submissions

Dmytro Fedoruk spent two decades in law before he started building software for it. He headed the corporate practice at Clifford Chance in Ukraine before spinning it out into the independent law firm Redcliffe Partners, which he co-founded and ran.

Throughout those years, one important but particularly painful process kept coming back every year: preparing submissions for Chambers, Legal 500 and other independent legal directories.

For law firms, rankings matter. They influence reputation, recruitment and the ability to win work. But preparing the submissions behind those rankings remains remarkably manual.

Lawyers and business development teams spend weeks finding previous matters, reconstructing experience, drafting descriptions and repackaging much of the same information for different directories. Dmytro saw an opportunity to automate it. That became Ranking Copilot.

Explaining a niche investors hadn’t seen

The hard part of the raise wasn’t finding people with money. It was getting anyone to understand the product.

Milos Trifunovic, Ranking Copilot’s COO, runs the ThatRound account day to day.

“Most of them actually didn’t know about the space, and what we do. What we actually do is unique, and you have to be from legal space in order to understand it.”

That is a specific kind of difficulty, and it stretched the round out.

“There was a low point during the raise because it was difficult. First, one of the things is to explain what we do. Those ones who understood, they invested. It took us several months to just get to the point to get that threshold, like the minimum one for the raise.”

Raising for the second time

Dmytro had two decades in law behind him. What neither of them had was fundraising experience. Milos was learning the process while running it.

“This is our second round. We didn’t have any previous experience.”

They came to ThatRound at a late pre-seed, around 12 months after launch, raising for platform development and growth.

How getting set up on ThatRound found gaps in the pitch

“We are doing this for the first time, and we didn’t know all of the things that we should include in that pitch.” Milos explains.

The first version of their pitch page was missing things they didn’t know to include. To get published on ThatRound, every startup’s pitch page is reviewed by a person before it goes live, and that review comes back with what to add.

“The process of uploading the pitch and then presenting our company was straightforward, and it definitely improved it because initially we didn’t have everything that was important. So we missed out on some things, and the ThatRound team actually highlighted the important ones.”

What changed wasn’t just the page. It was how they presented the business. For a founder raising for the first time, that’s the part worth taking from this, because you can’t fix a gap you can’t see.

Finding investor fit

Once their page was live, Ranking Copilot unlocked their list of relevant investors ranked by fit rather than a directory to work through. Milos recalls:

“When I saw the list of those matches, I was actually excited because I didn’t have to do manual work, like trying to find someone that matches where they usually invest. So that saved a lot of time. It was also great to just click two buttons to just apply, so I don’t have to go through the usual long forms where I need to answer many questions.”

Learning how to tell the story

Getting the right investors into the room didn’t remove the need to explain the business. But throughout the raise, the Ranking Copilot team got better at communicating what it was building and why it mattered.

As Milos puts it:

“We learnt throughout this process how to pitch better, and to make it easier for them to understand what we do.”

Investor questions helped the team see where its message was clear, and where it still leaned too heavily on specialist legal knowledge.

“It definitely helped us understand how we can improve ourselves and present better in the future.”

Where the pre-seed round got to

Two of the investors ThatRound identified as a fit for Ranking Copilot went on to invest.

Angel6 came up on their investor list as a fit for what they were building, and invested £50,000 in the round. SyndicateRoom was also on that list, and has since invested.

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"What convinced us to back Dmytro and Ranking Copilot was the recognition that the team has experienced the pain points first-hand and has the domain and technical experience necessary to build what is required in this space. Alongside that, the initial traction with paying clients is an encouraging early signal.”

— Tom Shepherd, Investment Associate at SyndicateRoom
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The round exceeded its minimum of £450,000.

Why Angel6 said yes to investing in Ranking Copilot

Milos’s read on the raise was that the investors who understood the product were the ones who backed it. Alister Esam at Angel6 is a case in point, and his version of understanding it was simpler than he expected.

”What stood out for me is that Ranking Copilot is focussed on doing backend work thereby increasing law firms chargeable hours.  Most legal tech is trying to reduce them. That means they are pushing on an open door which is a setup for fast growth. For me, it came down to the things I look for in any investment: genuine traction, fast growth, a large enough market, and a valuation that gives investors the opportunity to make a meaningful return."

— Alister Esam, CEO and Founder of Angel6.

Lessons for startup founders

Asked what Milos would tell a founder at pre-seed considering using ThatRound:

“They definitely should use ThatRound and try it at least. It will make their life easier. If they are doing this even for the first time, it will help them better present themselves. But also it will save them time finding those potential matches of investors. Otherwise, they’ll spend time doing it manually and even make mistakes, like trying to present themselves to investors that are not relevant for their space or industry.”

Dmytro, asked separately what had made the biggest difference:

“We felt a bit of personal touch, which is very important, and we tried other platforms as well, but we didn’t have any personal touch with those.”

— Dmytro Fedoruk, CEO and Founder of Ranking Copilot

More than £1 million raised

Having raised more than £500k, total funding since inception has reached more than £1 million. For Dmytro, one of the things that distinguished ThatRound from other fundraising platforms was the human involvement behind the technology.

What comes next for Ranking Copilot

Ranking Copilot started as a tool for legal rankings. But Dmytro’s ambition is bigger than rankings: the same write-ups law firms prepare, the work, the client, the result, are just as useful when they’re pitching for new business. So rather than staying a rankings-only tool, the plan is for firms to write that information up once and reuse it wherever it’s needed, whether that’s a ranking submission or a new-business pitch.

Dmytro says the company is targeting a larger seed round in 2027, with a Series A to follow.

Learn more about Ranking Copilot at rankingcopilot.com, or follow the company on LinkedIn.

This round was backed by SyndicateRoom (syndicateroom.com) and Angel6 (angel6.co.uk).