SpotDraft lands $26 million in Series A funding to streamline contracts for legal teams

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been dominating headlines in recent months, thanks to OpenAI ChatGPT. However, before ChatGPT became a global phenomenon, startups have been using AI to transform legal services. For example, in a controlled study a few years ago, 20 experienced US-trained lawyers were beaten by Legal AI software developed by Israel SaaS platform startup LawGeex.

However, LawGeex is just one of a few AI startups disrupting the $700 billion legal industry. Another company is SpotDraft, a New York-based startup that provides AI-powered Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) solutions for high-growth startups and scaleups. Since its inception, SpotDraft’s Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) has processed more than 1 million contracts and saved 1.5 million hours previously spent on tedious paperwork for customers such as Airbnb, Notion, Panasonic, Strava, and Chargebee.

To further grow its platform, SpotDraft announced 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. SpotDraft will use the new cash infusion for product development and aggressive growth in North America, which the company identified as a key market.

Founded in 2017 by CEO 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.

Shashank Bijapur co-founded SpotDraft in 2017 with Carnegie Mellon computer scientists Madhav Bhagat and Rohith Salim after working as a Wall Street lawyer in the U.S. The three co-founders met at a Diwali party in New York and moved back to India in 2016.

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.

In a statement, Bijapur said: “The volume of work flowing through legal teams can often cause bottlenecks. 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.” Bijapur continued: “However, they’re often being 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.”

SpotDraft’s intuitive platform is built to be utilized 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 organize 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.

“Contracting has multiple stakeholders, including legal, sales, 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 organization.”