Robert Ambrogi Blog
Confido Legal, an embedded payments platform built specifically for law firms and the legal technology companies that serve them, has raised $9 million in financing across two rounds, the company told LawNext in an exclusive advance interview.
The latest and larger of the two rounds was led by Aquiline Capital Partners, a global private investment firm with approximately $12 billion in assets under management and a focus on financial services and technology.
Additional participants included The Legal Tech Fund, Breakwater Ventures, Live Oak Bank and Context Ventures, which also led the earlier seed round.
The announcement combines the current round, which closed in November, with the seed round from 2024, which Confido’s co-founder and CEO Emery Wager said totaled a little over $2 million.
The two rounds are being disclosed together now because neither had been publicly announced previously, Wager said.
Aquiline’s interest in the deal reflects its existing familiarity with both the legal technology and payments sectors. In legal, Aquiline is majority owner of the practice management company SurePoint and is also an investor in ABCLegal, Consilio and LegalMation.
“They really have a unique overlap between payments and legal tech,” Wager said. “They’ve done a couple big payments investments, and so they’re a great partner in terms of experience both in legal tech and payments.”
From Gravity Payments to Independence
Confido Legal’s history runs through Seattle-based Gravity Payments, the payments processing company known for its headline-making decision in 2015 to institute a $70,000 minimum salary for all employees.
Wager, who earned an engineering degree from Stanford and served as a U.S. Marine Corps infantry officer with deployments to Afghanistan, joined Gravity’s corporate development team in August 2013, spending nearly a decade focused on strategic partnerships, product development and marketing.
In February 2019, Gravity launched what was then called Gravity Legal as an internal subdivision, designed to bring payments processing tailored to law firm trust accounting and IOLTA compliance to the legal market. By 2023, with the legal-specific business having developed its own distinct identity and customer base, the decision was made to spin it out as an independent company.
With a small founding team and limited capital, the independent company found its footing quickly, Wager told me.
“The business just took off,” he said. “It was half as many people working on it, but those people were foot to the fire, really motivated.”
In December 2023, the company officially rebranded as Confido Legal, taking its name from the Latin word for “trust,” a reference to the trust account management that is one of the core capabilities of the platform.
What the Company Does
Confido positions itself as infrastructure rather than a standalone product for end users. Its platform is built around a single GraphQL API that allows legal technology companies to embed payment acceptance, trust account management, and – more recently – digital disbursements directly into their own applications, without having to build compliance, fraud prevention and underwriting capabilities from scratch.
The compliance angle is not incidental. Law firms are required under state bar rules to maintain strict separation between client trust funds and their own operating accounts, and IOLTA regulations govern how interest on those accounts is handled.
Generic payment processors were not built with these requirements in mind, and Wager argues that retrofitting a general-purpose platform like Stripe for legal use is both time-consuming and costly for legal tech developers.
“Our pitch to the developers is, ‘Hey, we have this legal-specific toolbox that they can integrate with, and they don’t have to worry about chaining multiple accounts together.”
As of 2026, the company reports serving more than 1,500 law firms across the United States and Canada, primarily through its legal tech partners rather than through direct law firm relationships.
Its integration partners include practice management platforms such as Clio Manage, Lawmatics, Lawcus, SmartAdvocate, and Prima.Law, as well as financial and accounting tools including QuickBooks Online and NetSuite.
Disbursements: A Growing Focus
A significant portion of the new capital is directed at expanding Confido’s disbursements product, which the company launched using funds from its 2024 round. Where the payments acceptance side of the business focuses on law firms collecting fees from clients, disbursements addresses the outbound flow of money – sending settlement funds, unused retainer balances or award payments to clients and other parties after a case resolves.
Wager said the target market here is plaintiff-side firms – personal injury, workers’ compensation and mass tort practices – where the current standard is still largely paper checks.
Part of his company’s challenge, he said, has been simply convincing law firms that sending settlement funds digitally is ethically permissible under bar rules.
“We’ve had to teach that side of the industry that it is ethical to digitally disburse money from your IOLTA account,” he said.
The company has signed a deal with the litigation management platform Litify to power a branded disbursements offering and is working with additional case management platforms on the plaintiff side that it expects to announce in the near future.
While the current disbursements product handles the client-facing side of payouts well, Wager said the company will be further developing its capabilities around making payments to medical providers, lienholders and other third parties involved in case resolution.
Position in the Market
Confido’s most direct competitor in the legal payments space is 8am’s LawPay product, which holds significant market share and strong brand recognition. But Wager frames the competitive landscape somewhat differently, pointing to Stripe as the company he thinks about most, given Confido’s developer-focused approach.
“I wake up every day and think, how can we be so valuable in our vertical that it just doesn’t make sense to integrate with something like Stripe,” he said.
The appeal to legal tech developers is that Confido offers a single API and a single underwriting process to cover the full range of payments and financial workflows their law firm customers need – avoiding the need to connect multiple financial services with different compliance requirements.
The company also uses machine learning to assess the risk profile of individual transactions and detect fraud – an unsexy but important function, given that, as Wager noted, bad actors periodically attempt to establish fraudulent law firm accounts to exploit the payment infrastructure.
Broader Ambitions
Beyond payments and disbursements, Wager has his eye on a wider range of embedded financial services for law firms, including lending, treasury management and banking services, though he declined to offer specifics on what products might come next.
“I’m very personally excited about the roadmap,” he said. “There’s so much in finance, and it seems every time we turn around there’s new money moving in law in a regulated way.”
Zach Posner, managing partner of The Legal Tech Fund, which participated in both rounds, described the company’s approach as a response to a longstanding problem.
“The Confido team continues to deliver purpose-built, compliant infrastructure that allows money to move the way law firms and legal technology companies need,” he said in a statement.
Dante La Ruffa, the Aquiline partner who led the investment, said the firm sees Confido as building toward becoming the central financial platform for the legal market.
“Confido makes it easier for law firms and LegalTech platforms to get paid and pay out funds by building compliant, modern payments and payouts directly into the systems they already use,” he said.
For Wager, who has seen his business grow significantly since spinning off three years ago, his longer-term goal is not about a quick exit, he told me, but about building something durable in a market he sees as having a long runway.
“I would love for Confido to reach new heights in the next 20, 30, 40 years,” he said.