Evisort has raised $100m in capital, including equity and venture debt financing – as the legal tech world goes into CLM overdrive. This was a Series C funding round and Evisort’s total funding is now approximately $155m.
This latest round of funding is led by global growth investor TCV, a key investor in Airbnb, LinkedIn, Netflix, and other market-defining companies. TCV General Partner Amol Helekar will join the Evisort board of directors. This financing round includes participation by Breyer Capital and all major existing investors, including General Atlantic, Microsoft’s venture capital fund M12, Amity Ventures, and Vertex Ventures.
‘Every time an organisation buys, sells, hires, or otherwise transacts, it creates a contractual data layer. We created Evisort because it is absolutely critical for organisations to easily access and manage this data inside their contracts. We couldn’t be more grateful for the trust of our hundreds of customers to build this innovative technology with us,’ said Evisort Co-Founder and CEO Jerry Ting. ‘Now, we will accelerate this momentum as these additional funds will supplement our existing capital to further our vision for making contract operations stronger and more meaningful than ever.’
OK, let’s put this in context.
As seen yesterday, SirionLabs bagged $85m, and Parley Pro was bought by LexisNexis. Here are some other recent investment deals – and it’s just a selection – which total about half a billion dollars in less than two years:
- CLM LinkSquares Bags $100m Series C Funding – April 2022
- CLM Ironclad Bags $150m Series E Funding – Jan 2022
- ContractPodAi Bags $115m in SoftBank-Led CLM Funding – Sept 2021
- ‘CLM 2.0’ Funding Increases as Malbek Bags $15.3m – Sept 2021
- NLP-Driven Contract Platform Evisort Bags $35m, Microsoft Fund Joins Again – Feb 2021
- CLM Lexion Bags $11m, Wilson Sonsini Invests Again – June 2021
- CLM Icertis Bags $80m – March 2021
There seems to be no need to repeat yesterday’s points about the CLM market (see here), but as this site explored today (see here) CLM’s growth matters to the whole legal tech sector:
‘If the clients are more savvy about how their own work is done [after the catalysing effect of implementing a CLM system] and are [afterwards] engaging with the law firms in a more meaningful way about process, data, workflows, efficiency and things like transaction speed and cost, then law firms will have to look even more to legal tech solutions, (as well as improving their own processes and developing new or better talent to help).
Law firms that want to keep their clients happy and worry that they might get fired, which is most but not all of them, will have to increase their investments in how they perform their work. I.e. delivery will become ever more important.
Some of the larger firms are already travelling down this road – but it’s still early days across the market as a whole. Looked at from a distance it seems that we are in the mid-1980s of personal computing when it comes to the impact of legal tech – even now. And for Artificial Lawyer that is an exciting prospect, i.e. even after all this time, and when the first legal tech company started in the 1950s, we are just beginning the journey of real change.
And, last point: perhaps the reason sector-wide change has been so slow is because the most important person in the room – the client – has rarely been part of the discussion, or at least not in a way where they are as knowledgeable as perhaps they’d like to be when it comes to really improving legal services delivery. No wonder market evolution is super-incremental when those who hold all the money and all the power (i.e. the clients) are not – and perhaps could not be in the past – really engaged with the subject in hand.
But, that is changing and CLM is playing a key role in this. So too legal ops and other legal tech providers to the inhouse world, as well as other enterprise software companies that have an impact on the corporate legal teams.
So, for these reasons, and even if you are not involved in these kinds of products, we should cheer CLM companies on and wish them every success, as their success will be a benefit to the market as a whole.’
There you go and congrats to Jerry, Memme and all the team at Evisort.
P.S. here is an AL TV video of how Evisort works – see here.
This is a lofty stride for such a young company. Congratulations wonderful Evisort team.