Atrium, the legal software startup founded by Twitch creator Justin Kan, is reportedly shutting down and returning some of its funding to investors

justin kan atrium ceo

Legal-tech startup Atrium is reportedly shuttering its operations and laying off its 100 employees, TechCrunch's Josh Constine reported Tuesday.
The company, founded by Twitch creator Justin Kan, reportedly said it would return some of the $75.5 million that it had attracted in funding from investors like Andreessen Horowitz.
Earlier this year, Atrium announced that it would restructure its services and let go of most of its in-house lawyers.
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Legal-tech startup Atrium is reportedly letting go of its 100 employees and shuttering its operations, TechCrunch's Josh Constine reported Tuesday. The company also reportedly said it would be returning some of the $75 million that it had attracted in funding from investors.

Atrium did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment.

Atrium founder and CEO Justin Kan is perhaps best known as the creator of modern live-streaming with the launch of Twitch, which sold to Amazon for nearly $1 billion in 2014.

But his second act as the founder behind the legal services and software startup faltered to deliver on its initial promise to disrupt the legal services industry.

The three-year-old startup initially had a vision to build software tools for its in-house law firm, that could then provide startups with more efficient legal services. It even envisioned bundling these machine-learning software tools to sell to law firms in the future. And that vision helped the company raise $60 million in a Series B funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz.

At the beginning of this year however, the company announced that it would be restructuring its services to focus more on its software products. The changes announced were drastic, and involved letting go of most of the company's in-house lawyers. The company would also broaden its focus beyond legal advice, Kan announced in a blog post.

"We've made the tough decision to restructure the company to accommodate growth into new business services through our existing professional services network. This change impacts our workforce in a couple of ways," Kan wrote in January, adding that the company's in-house lawyers would shift to becoming "preferred providers in our professional services network."

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