Eying An IPO In The Next Year, LegalZoom Raises $66M From Kleiner Perkins And IVP

You may have heard of LegalZoom, which is basically an online service that helps people create their own legal documents. The site makes its relatively easy to do simple legal functions such as writing a last will, incorporating a business, trademark a name or creating a real estate lease. The fact is that paying a lawyer to draw up these documents can be expensive and LegalZoom wants to democratize legal document creation.

Investors are betting big on the service as well. A few months ago, LegalZoom announced that it had raised funding from Kleiner Perkins and Institutional Venture Partners. At the time, the company declined to reveal how much it has raised. And now the company is willing to talk numbers—Kleiner and IVP put a whopping $66 million into LegalZoom. That brings the company’s total funding to over $100 million.

LegalZoom, which is the brainchild of serial entrepreneur Brian Lee (he also founded ShoeDazzle with Kim Kardashian), Eddie Hartman, and Brian Liu, is also profitable and is seeing north of a $100 million in revenue. The company has helped nearly 2 million customers create legal documents.

John Suh, CEO of LegalZoom tells us that an IPO is definitely on the horizon but is in no rush to go public. “Just because you can go public doesn’t mean you should go public,” he explains. Suh says that in the end a public offering is simply a financing event and while the company could have gone public this year, LegalZoom isn’t in need of new funding.

Suh’s assertion is fair, but there are certainly other benefits to taking a company public, including the marketing and public to new investors. But LegalZoom has been actively marketing its product in expensive advertising channels, including television. You can see one of the company’s commercials here.