NLP-Driven Contract Platform Evisort Bags $35m, Microsoft Fund Joins Again

Artificial Lawyer had a feeling today was going to be a busy day….

Evisortthe NLP-driven contract management platform, has bagged a $35m Series B investment, bringing its total funding to $55.5m. The company said that this has come after they had quadrupled revenues in the last year.

General Atlantic led the round, with participation from existing investors Amity Ventures, Microsoft’s venture fund M12, and Vertex Ventures. General Atlantic’s Operating Partner and former GE CIO, Gary Reiner, will join Evisort as a board member.

The company will use the funds to grow its customer success team, expand its platform to include more workflow-specific offerings, and continue to push its pre-trained NLP in new directions.

Clearly feeling in a rather ebullient mood the company said: ‘Unlike most contract management solutions which merely streamline processes, Evisort’s cloud-native, end-to-end platform has helped enterprises do business faster and uncover millions of dollars in potential cost savings and new revenue hidden in their contracts.

‘For example, one customer was able to recognise hundreds of thousands of dollars in unfulfilled rebates because Evisort identified discount clauses in thousands of vendor contracts and issued a notification through the finance system before the vendor invoices were paid.’

Evisort Founder and CEO, Jerry Ting, added: ‘Whenever any part of the business touches a contract, whether that’s an accounting professional finding savings or a salesperson negotiating a better deal, Evisort will be there delivering insights they can act on. We’re building the intelligent contract management platform enterprises actually need with innovative AI capabilities they didn’t know were possible.’

Some thoughts from AL

Perhaps the strangest thing here is that seeing $35m go into an NLP-driven legal tech company is no longer a ‘Wow…!’ moment. Now it’s more like a ‘Great stuff team! Congratulations’. I.e. somehow the legal tech market has got used to seeing this kind of figure. We applaud, but we don’t fall off our sofas. And that’s a good thing as it shows the wider market has woken up to what this type of tech can achieve.

Second, it shows that the CLM space is really going to face some stiff competition. Agiloft, Parley Pro, ContractPodAi, LinkSquares and others – are all offering (at varying levels) corporates the ability to stay on top of their contracts using NLP capabilities.

Then there are the more ‘traditional’ doc review companies offering inhouse legal teams the same service. And then there are the Big Four and legal process providers also getting into this via their LMS approach. Not to mention companies such as Knowable, which came out of Axiom and has a JV with LexisNexis, and is using a mix of NLP and human review.

All in all it’s gone from a very quiet space a few years ago to one that is red hot.

There is of course much to play for. Every large company on the planet could get value out of the systems named above. Which ones will gain the biggest market share remains to be seen. It’s really another one of those everything to play for moments in a sector’s development.

(Congrats guys! AL still owes you dinner for taking me out (twice) to the Harvard Club – maybe see you in the US at the end of the year…?)