Contracting automation pioneer, Synergist, has announced a €1m ‘innovation subsidy’ funding from the Investitionsbank Berlin, which is the region’s business development bank.
The cash comes from Investitionsbank Berlin’s Pro FIT program, which is designed to boost the intensity of research, development and innovation in Berlin, where Synergist is based.
Synergist’s Australian co-founder, Ed Taylor, explained what all of this means in a detailed post, reproduced with kind permission here:
‘We are [now] encouraged to apply “moonshot thinking” to solve problems and over the next 18 months we’ll break new ground in two areas; an intelligent negotiation assistant with guidance on how to respond in a negotiation, and a software-based mediator that identifies zones of possible agreement, both of which are made possible with the large contract and behavioural data sets collected from deals executed on synergist.io.’
Synergist.io has been shaped first and foremost by users with an emphasis on ease of use, flexibility and security. This innovation subsidy allows us to extend our simple, intuitive negotiation experience to more complex contracting scenarios. In addition we’ll address our users’ demand to enable “smart contracts” by extracting key contract terms (supplier performance, sales order delivery for example) and managing them across existing business systems.
Synergist.io is used by procurement departments, commercial teams and alternative legal service providers to execute high-volumes of recurring contracts with minimal effort. We provide a centralised and transparent workflow that is optimised for negotiating contract terms — the most tedious and unpredictable step in the process.
Users can manage increasing volumes of contracts required to onboard suppliers or close new business, all with minimal involvement from legal. They’re guided step-by-step through the process and are empowered to negotiate where necessary, within safe boundaries and using terms that have been pre-approved by their legal team.
Venture investment in legal tech has intensified in 2017 with contract management startup Ironclad raising $8M and hybrid law firm / legal tech startup Atrium LTS raising $10.5M. As companies become increasingly educated on advances in legal tech we’re seeing adoption increase as the benefits (speed, simplicity, cost) begin to outweigh the concerns (security, familiarity, legacy).’