Chiamaka was drafting an employment contract in her Abuja firm when she caught herself copy-pasting a non-compete clause she had written in 2019 for a different client in a different industry.
She spent 45 minutes cross-checking whether it was still appropriate. It was. Four months later, at a FATE Foundation legaltech roundtable in Lagos, she described the problem to Giulia Conti — an Italian product lead recently relocated from Milan — who said quietly: "We had the same problem in Italian commercial law five years ago. It is the same product."
Giulia introduced Mamadou Diop, a Senegalese engineer at Andela Lagos with three years of multilingual NLP experience from Wave Mobile Money in Dakar. By December 2024 all three were full-time. LexNova Technologies Ltd. was incorporated at the Corporate Affairs Commission in February 2025 — without a pre-seed round, on the strength of a ₦8M FATE Foundation grant and two angel cheques.
"There has to be a way," Chiamaka had said that first afternoon, "to make the firm's institutional knowledge — all of it — available in the 45 minutes I spent checking that one clause."
Soft launch in May 2025. First cash-flow-positive month, November 2025. Today: 870 active subscriptions across 632 paying organisations — and no further funding round planned.
