SpotDraft raises $26M in Series A funding with participation from Prosus Ventures

SpotDraft Raises $26 Million in Series A Funding for AI-Powered Legal Software

SpotDraft’s Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) has processed more than 1 million contracts, saved 1.5 million hours on legal work

NEW YORK - March 2, 2023 - SpotDraft, the leading AI-powered Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) solution for high-growth startups and scaleups, today announced it closed $26 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Premji Invest, with participation from Prosus Ventures, 021 Capital, Arkam Ventures, Riverwalk Holdings, and 100x Entrepreneur Fund. The cash infusion is earmarked for further product development and aggressive growth in North America, identified as a key market by the company.

SpotDraft’s intuitive platform is built to be utilised not just by legal teams but also sales, marketing, human resources, business operations, and procurement. It leverages the legal team’s expertise without creating bottlenecks or wasting time on repetitive tasks. Teams can easily create, manage, review, and execute contracts, seamlessly store and organise agreements, submit legal requests and approvals, and generate risk reports automatically from a modern dashboard. The web app integrates with tech stacks used by startups and enterprises, including Salesforce, Hubspot, Slack, Google Drive, and more.

SpotDraft’s AI-powered CLM has processed over 1 million contracts and has freed up over 1.5 million hours previously spent on tedious paperwork for customers such as Airbnb, Notion, Panasonic, Strava, and Chargebee. The company’s AI adaption speeds up various aspects of the contract review and management process, such as providing a quick summary of tracked changes received, enabling semantic search across contracts, and generating follow-up tasks on contract execution.

“The volume of work flowing through legal teams can often cause bottlenecks,” said Shashank Bijapur, co-founder & CEO at SpotDraft. “Apart from dealing with legal work, today’s legal teams are expected to be leaders in everything from business strategy and governance to compliance and risk management. However, they’re often asked to do all of this with one hand tied behind their backs. We like to think of what we are building as a co-pilot for legal teams - a system that acts as a strategic partner for in-house counsels by taking care of the repetitive tasks and thereby enabling them to focus on higher leverage activities.”

In fact, recent studies suggest legal teams spend upward of five hours per week on repetitive tasks - searching for documents, recreating existing documents, and fielding redundant inquiries from sales, marketing, and business operations teams. That time spent equates to as much as $25,000 per year per lawyer, according to analyses by Gartner and IDC. On average, only 2.3 hours of each workday are spent on legal work, per a survey of almost 3,000 legal professionals across the U.S.

Founded by Shashank Bijapur, Madhav Bhagat, and Rohith Salim, the 170-person SpotDraft team has decades of combined experience in the legal field as well as in building world-class products at companies like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, IBM and Linkedin.

“Contracting has multiple stakeholders, including legal, sales, and finance, and it is important to create a seamless experience for all of them,” said Atul Gupta, Partner at Premji Invest. “We invested in SpotDraft's world-class team because they’ve elegantly solved this business problem and created a product that is loved by teams across the organisation.”

“While leading organisations around the world are already investing in automated CLM tools, the overall level of adoption is still relatively modest,” said Ashutosh Sharma, Head of India Investments for Prosus Ventures. “Further, there are few good quality, modern, end-to-end CLM solutions for the mid-market segment. SpotDraft has addressed this gap efficiently with its strong value proposition and demonstrated strong early traction and significant cost advantages. We are pleased to partner with a founding team that understands the specific problems in this domain and is passionate about offering solutions that work at scale.”

For more information, visit www.spotdraft.com

About SpotDraft

SpotDraft is a best-in-class end-to-end contract management and automation solution that acts as a digital record system for in-house legal teams. SpotDraft’s AI-driven solution empowers in-house legal teams to save up to 5 hours per week and helps them close deals 25 per cent faster, freeing them to focus on more strategic projects. Founded by Shashank Bijapur, Madhav Bhagat, and Rohith Salim, the team has decades of combined experience in the legal field as well as in building world-class products at companies like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, IBM and Linkedin. Since its founding, SpotDraft has tripled its revenue and doubled its headcount year over year. The company works with high-growth businesses across the U.S., Europe, the Middle East, and Asia Pacific regions.