Puma Growth Partners (“Puma”), a leading provider of growth capital to small and medium-sized businesses, has led a $4.3 million investment into legal and financial technology specialist, Semeris.
Semeris was founded in 2020 by Peter Jasko, former head of JPMorgan’s European CLO team, and Sam Daroczy, co-founder and former CEO of Verba Technologies, a fintech company acquired by Verint Systems.
Semeris provides what it calls ‘superhuman powers for legal docs’ by combining large language models with human expertise to analyse complex legal documents in the debt and structured finance markets.
Traditionally, professionals sift through hundreds of pages of legal text, balancing intricate compliance requirements and risking costly oversights. Semeris’s human-in-the-loop hybrid technology replaces this painstaking process, delivering faster, more accurate results while meeting the standards of finance industry regulators.
The firm offers a rapidly growing library of more than 5,000 analysed structured finance transactions covering Collateralised Loan Obligations (CLOs), Asset-Backed Securities (ABS), Mortgage-Backed Securities (MBS), leveraged loans, and high-yield bonds. These libraries help clients mitigate risk and save valuable time. Semeris has built a repository of over a million analyst-verified data points, forming a reliable reference library for quality assurance and AI training.
Four of the global top five CLO law firms use Semeris to answer “What’s market?” questions and speed up drafting. Semeris’s libraries can deliver a 10x-faster deal review process, and customers report significantly faster turnaround times on ad hoc, market-wide inquiries, reducing research timelines from months to days. For teams used to juggling multiple systems and manually verifying each clause, this accelerated process is transformative, allowing them to focus on strategic deal execution instead of painstaking detail work.
The investment will enable Semeris to strengthen its sales team, scale its platform, and meet the growing demand for GenAI solutions in structured finance. As deal structures become increasingly complex and compliance pressures mount, Semeris’s specialised expertise uniquely positions it to address niches that more general-purpose AI providers cannot effectively serve.
“We’re thrilled to partner with Puma Growth Partners and independent investors as we embark on this exciting next chapter for Semeris,” said Peter Jasko, CEO of Semeris.
“Their investment will accelerate our expansion beyond CLOs and ABS/MBS into other asset classes and document types, such as credit agreements in leveraged loans and private credit, equipping structured finance professionals with AI-powered tools that drastically reduce turnaround times and tackle challenges previously out of reach. With Puma’s support, we’re advancing our mission to revolutionise legal documentation, delivering superhuman powers, unmatched precision, and clarity, while paving the way for smarter, more efficient finance workflows.”
Henri Songeur, Investment Director at Puma Growth Partners, commented:
“This is an incredibly exciting opportunity for us to back an ambitious management team with a deep understanding of their customers’ user journeys and pain points when reviewing complex financial legal documents. Their previous experience leading investment desks in large financial institutions has been key to devising an innovative AI-led solution to address this issue. This is coupled with the experience they have in building, and then exiting, a business successfully. We also validated the product’s value proposition with their impressive client list which includes some of the world’s leading financial institutions who all reviewed Semeris highly.
“Semeris now has a great opportunity to scale the business, expand into new asset classes and offer new, and existing customers, a wider range of products and services. We look forward to supporting Peter, Sam and the wider Semeris team on delivering this growth.”