AI-driven CLM LinkSquares has raised $100m in Series C financing led by G Squared, with participation from new investor G2 Venture Partners as well as existing investors.
This brings the company’s total funding to $161.5m, at a current valuation of $800m, (although this site has to say that it really does not believe valuation figures are anything more than an optimistic guess and so should not be taken too seriously – consider all the super-valuable companies that never reached their targets. Some will surpass expectations, but valuations don’t really help to keep the market in the real world).
To date, the company has built relationships with more than 500+ in-house legal teams, including Wayfair, DraftKings, and Drift.
With the new funding, the company intends to further advance its contract management offerings, while also modernising tools in other areas of priority for CLOs, GCs and their teams.
So, What Does It Mean?
If we needed any more signs that CLM is raging at the moment, then here we go again. In January Ironclad bagged $150m – see article, and in September last year ContractPodAi bagged $115m from SoftBank – see article. Also in 2021 Icertis bagged $80m – see article.
And only last year LinkSquares bagged an earlier $40m – see article.
At the time Vishal Sunak, CEO and co-founder of the company, said: ‘CLM is a 20-year-old market that is going through a full renaissance. Companies seeking CLM solutions are beginning to see clear themes in existing players in terms of capabilities mapping against internal use cases and problems they are looking to solve.
‘It’s a changing of the guard between the older players and the new emerging providers who are thinking about the problem at hand from fresher perspectives, with a significant technology advantage, and without the baggage of solving this problem 20 years ago.’
And: ‘I think the global CLM market is so huge, it can create multiple large companies in the future – the opportunity is that great and the adoption is that low. But you also see lots of ‘component’ players that are doing great work in areas such as contract assembly, redlining and negotiation, and workflows.’
Overall, this doesn’t really change the narrative that started back in late 2020, i.e. a number of CLM companies believe the corporate world is their oyster – and that it is a massive one. They believe that CLM has only just started to make an impact and these companies will become multi-billion dollar giants in the years to come. That is certainly the narrative the investors are buying into.
But who will win and who will lose….? And can they all win? The latter seems unlikely, at least in terms of becoming one of the perhaps two or three companies that end up dominating this space. Interesting times.
See: Who will win the CLM game of thrones…?
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