After signing up 40 customers, they staged an angel round, backed by five individuals with big names in their respective fields: Geoff Nightingale (accounting), Michael Heron KC (law), Adam Clark (the Auckland entrepreneur who made his fortune creating and selling mobile payments firm M-Com), Sir Stephen Tindall and Serge van Dam (tech investment). Longtime PwC NZ executive Nightingale also became a director. So did Clark.

How did the start-up mavens lure Nightingale on board? “He was – and is – a customer. I recognised the name, and asked whether we could have regular catch-ups,” Wierda says. (Nightingale formed his own consultancy after leaving PwC.)

“Mike [Michael Heron] was introduced to me by PwC’s chief AI officer, Scott McLiver,” Wierda says. “I reached out cold to Scott on LinkedIn.”

A seed round followed soon after, supported by Australasia’s largest venture capital firm, Blackbird.

With $2.5m in their kitty, Law Cyborg’s founders expanded from tax into employment law too, hired staff (22 locally and five in the UK) and expanded into Australia and Britain.

Today, the start-up – recently rebranded as “Nylon” – has 1800 paying customers, who pay $39, $99 or $199 per user per month, depending on features and how many credits are used (one credit could be a “one deep research run or one hour of AI meeting notes). There’s also custom pricing for the largest customers.

Its customers include the mid-tier multinationals UHY, William Buck and RSM. It counts two of the “Big Four” as its clients.

Wierda won’t give financials, but says revenue is now “more than we’ve raised”.

$20m raise

He’s now swinging for the fences.

Wierda spoke to the Herald from San Francisco, where he’s meeting with various venture capital firms as he embarks on a $20m seed raise. His itinerary also includes meetings with VCs in New York and London.

“We’ve had fantastic support from New Zealand investors who backed us early,” Wierda says.

“As we take on the global incumbents, we’re also looking to bring in international investors who know these markets well and can help us really scale up and go global.”

‘Issue-spotting’ note-taker

If successful, the raise will be used to fund expansion across the UK and US and build more US-specific features.

Nylon’s core product uses AI to answer detailed questions on tax and law,

The start-up has also launched a meeting bot that sits in on client and advisory meetings across accounting and law.

The tool acts as an issue-spotting note-taker: It listens through the meeting, and if it identifies a potential problem, it flags it and surfaces it to everyone in a summary, Wierda says.

“Most note-takers just write down what was said. Ours actually understands the substance.

“If something doesn’t look right – a tax exposure, a compliance issue, a risk that’s been missed – it spots it and tells everyone. It’s like having a sharp junior in every meeting who never misses a detail.”

Putting a ‘harness’ on AI

Why should tax and accounting professionals bother with a middleman? Why not just put their thorny questions to Anthropic or OpenAI’s chatbots directly?

“I think they should use Claude or ChatGPT, and we have an MCP [model context protocol] which connects to those. We’re actually one of the only research providers to have an official plugin for ChatGPT.”

An MCP connects a chatbot to trusted databases and sources. Weirda says you can think of it as Nylon “putting a harness on AI agents”.

And beyond steering agents to trusted resources, it also gives a certainty rating on how, say, an IRD or ATO ruling is someone’s query, “very similar to how a human would when reading through information”.

Nylon’s technology restricts its AI to answering only from a defined set of verified sources, such as tax law, case files and government material, and provides in-text citations and a confidence score with every answer. The approach is designed for professionals who need to verify the source rather than take a general-purpose AI’s word for it.

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“AI is fundamentally changing the way lawyers and accountants work, the world over. We want to be the ones building the technology they rely on and trust every day,” Wierda says.

“There’s a real opportunity here to show that a New Zealand company can compete with the biggest names in the world in legal and tax research.”

POSTSCRIPT: Where does “Nylon” come from?

You can see why Wierda ditched “Law Cyborg”, which sounds like a Dr Who villain or something spat out of ChatGPT.

But why rebrand as “Nylon”?

“We would like to become the fabric of ‘trusted advisers’,” Wierda said.

“It’s also a strong, durable fabric used in tents and backpacks. So we thought suitable for a reliable product.”

Chris Keall is an Auckland-based member of the Herald’s business team. He joined the Herald in 2018 and is the technology editor and a senior business writer.