ContractZen has bagged €1m ($1.22m) in funding in what is another success for Nordic legal tech. The money will be used by the contract management to VDR platform to accelerate growth and boost its international marketing efforts.
The funding was led by the aptly-named Danish private equity firm, Nordic Eye Venture Capital.
Recently we have seen a spate of positive news stories about legal tech companies based in the Nordics, such as Contract Mill – also from Finland – being chosen as the tech partner for Wilson Sonsini’s summer associate programme in the US, and also Denmark’s Contractbook bagging $30m in funding last month, which will be used for a major expansion drive.
ContractZen is a bit of an unusual platform in that they offer:
- contract management,
- meeting management,
- virtual data rooms (VDR),
- as well as electronic signatures.
ContractZen is now used by close to 400 organisations in more than 30 countries. Current users of ContractZen include JCDecaux, Total and Volocopter – although the company generally has a focus on selling to the SME market. In addition, PwC Finland resells the solution to its customers via a partnership arrangement.
The company added that their SaaS solution is ‘inexpensive and therefore offers SMEs the opportunity to enjoy an enterprise-grade cloud service which has previously only been possible for large companies’. The SME sector has huge global potential for legal tech, they added.
Ib Drachmann, Nordic Eye’s Investment Manager and Partner, said of the funding: ‘We have followed ContractZen’s journey for more than six months. We are impressed by the level of customer satisfaction, great team skills and the scalable legal tech SaaS platform. With hundreds of customers across continents, ContractZen has proven its position to become truly global, and we are excited to join the journey.’
And Markus Mikola, CEO of ContractZen, added: ‘Our mission is to help organisations of all sizes to manage their contracts, board meetings and so-called GRC documents (Governance, Risk and Compliance) easier than ever before. We are pioneering a new category of SaaS which focuses on helping organisations to be ‘due diligence ready’ every day, enabling them to be more agile, more scalable, and ultimately more valuable.’
Once again the deal shows that there is more to legal tech than just the well-known centres such as the UK and US, and aside from a couple of hiccups in Germany in the midst of the pandemic, European legal tech companies appear to be doing increasingly well these days.
The focus on the SME sector is also interesting, as many legal tech companies tend toward selling to larger law firms, or the biggest corporates that have sizeable legal teams.
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[Main pic by RT – Helsinki, Finland. ]