CASE STUDY
From deal room to exit: how HighQ supports Lightspeed India’s deal lifecycle
Background
As venture capital activity accelerates across India and Southeast Asia, legal teams are under pressure to manage growing volumes of deal data, compliance obligations, and post-investment conditions.
For Vinayak Mishra, General Counsel at Lightspeed India, the solution was clear: “I’ve always tried to explore ways to make legal operations more efficient. When I joined Lightspeed India, there wasn’t an established legal function. We built one from the ground up.”
HighQ is integral to how the legal team operates at Lightspeed India now.
Lightspeed India required a legal technology platform that could function as a centralised repository for deal data, streamline task management through automation, and minimise the potential for human error.
“Before implementing HighQ, our processes were entirely manual making it difficult to track post-closing conditions, term sheet expiries, sharing confidential information with external parties, which often fell through the cracks. It quickly became clear that we needed a smarter and more reliable solution,” says Vinayak.
The challenge
Fragmented data and manual tracking
Lightspeed India’s legal team was managing a high volume of investment documentation and shareholder matters for funds advised by them. These were being hosted on multiple systems and formats.
“We had all the data, but it wasn’t synchronised. Around 55% of critical documents were not readily accessible,” explains Vinayak. “Tracking post-closing conditions manually with involvement of several external parties was taking up the full time of two people.”
3 reasons why Lightspeed India chose HighQ
After evaluating competing legal tech platforms over four months, HighQ stood out for three reasons:
- Customisability: “The platform could be tailored to our specific needs. The HighQ team worked closely with us to make sure it fit.”
- Trusted brand: “We didn’t want to go with a less established player. With Thomson Reuters behind HighQ, we had confidence in the product’s longevity.”
- Data security: “Our IT team vetted the platform thoroughly. HighQ passed with flying colours.”
Measurable returns
Since implementing HighQ, Lightspeed India has seen measurable improvements:
- Document recovery: Missing documents dropped from 55% to just 5–6%.
- Time savings: Due to the automated tracking of post-closing conditions now it takes just 10% of one person’s time in a week.
- Compliance: “We now have close to 100% compliance on term sheet expiries and post-closing conditions. That’s critical for our business. We also use the system for sharing transaction details with our tax advisors & audit partners, so it has become a single source of truth for all our deal documents”.
HighQ also plays a strategic role in investments and exits. “If funds don’t have the right documents in place, exit gets impacted. HighQ gives us the confidence that the funds we service are fully covered.”
A platform for scale and growth
For Vinayak, HighQ is “much more than a data mining platform”.
“I use HighQ to track timelines, track expiry of term sheets that Lightspeed India funds sign. We advise on a lot of deals and track the expiry dates for those term sheets. If that were to be manual, it would lead to errors, so, HighQ has helped me to have 100% compliance there.”
Lightspeed India’s journey with HighQ highlights the growing importance of legal technology in venture capital. As Vinayak Mishra puts it:
HighQ has helped us streamline our operations, reduce risk, and scale with confidence. I can’t imagine running our legal function without it
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