Before Clio, there was a childhood friendship and a very ambitious company name: Newton-Gauvreau Aerospace.
That was the first venture of Jack Newton and Rian Gauvreau, two boys who, by the company's own telling, met on a playground. It is easy to smile at the name. It is harder to ignore what it says. These two had been planning to build something together long before either knew what a law firm needed.
The founders have said little in public about their early money worries, and what exists online does not let us tell that story honestly.
The idea that stuck came later. In 2008 they set out to put law firms in the cloud. At the time that sounded close to reckless. Lawyers guard client files with near-religious care, and the profession was not known for rushing toward new technology. Asking a partner to move billing and case records onto servers they could not see was a hard sell.
The founders have said little in public about their early money worries, and what exists online does not let us tell that story honestly. What can be said is that they stayed with the problem for years. By March 2014 they had raised US$20m, which paid for the long, unglamorous work of convincing firms one by one.
What almost nobody saw coming was how far that patience would carry them. Cloud software became ordinary for lawyers, and Clio, built on a single idea from 2008, became the place many firms ran their practice. Then came the bigger bet. In November 2025 it completed a US$1bn acquisition of vLex, whose AI assistant Vincent works over a vast legal database, and raised US$500m led by NEA at a US$5bn valuation.
The cost of growing that fast shows in the numbers. Joining 350-plus vLex employees to a company of about 2,000 people means two cultures sharing one product.
For a first-time founder, the useful detail is the oldest one. Newton and Gauvreau did not meet through an accelerator. They were friends first, and they had already practised being partners on a project that never left the ground. The company that did take off was built by two people who knew exactly how the other worked under pressure.