Legendary tech investor, Y Combinator via its Continuity fund, has led a $50 million Series C funding round for contract creation and management platform, Ironclad. This is the latest in a series of major investments in contract platforms across the market, signalling that big money is now fully engaged in the legal tech sector – especially around platform offerings with contracts at their centre.
Ali Rowghani, CEO of Y Combinator Continuity, will be joining the Ironclad board. And just to get a sense of how significant a move this is: he served as the Chief Operating Officer of Twitter from 2012 to 2014, where he was in charge of Twitter’s product, design, business development, developer platform, and media teams. That is a very serious person to have on your board.
Jake Saper of Emergence, along with existing investors Accel and Sequoia Capital, also participated, bringing the US company’s total funding to $84 million.
For those that don’t know Ironclad, in a nutshell this is what they do: they help lawyers with rapid document creation, streamline contract workflows, support compliance checking, and provide data insights into contract stacks.
Also, interestingly, the company said that it sees its growing capabilities as a useful source of legal data for use by AI systems.
Jason Boehmig, the co-founder and CEO of Ironclad, said in a statement: ‘Contracts technology remains surprisingly primitive. In 2019, it is frustratingly difficult for companies to make and manage even simple, rote agreements. What’s more, as contract complexity continuously increases, so too does cost: today, tens of billions are spent every year just to manually extract information from analog documents and perform basic operational tasks.’
Boehmig added: ‘Our investors believe Ironclad is the future because we say what we mean and do what we say. We focus on the fundamentals: building up data foundations for robust artificial intelligence, for example.’
‘With our new investment, we’ll accelerate our expansion across geographies and industries, build capabilities that illuminate contract data and processes, and empower legal teams to do more,’ he concluded.