Looks like it’s funding season. Orbital announced its $60m yesterday, there’s another noteworthy one tomorrow, and today two more: India-based CLM company SpotDraft has extended its $56m series B raise from last year with an $8m boost from Qualcomm Ventures. Meanwhile IP startup Tradespace has raised a $15 million Series A funding round led by AVP.
For SpotDraft, the funding will be used to deepen its product and AI capabilities, and expand across the Americas, EMEA, and India, they said.
SpotDraft has raised $92m to date, with 100% year-over-year growth in customer acquisitions, contract volumes growing 173% year-over-year, and nearly 50,000 monthly active users now processing over 1 million contracts annually, the company added. In short, they’re doing well in what is a very competitive market for anything related to AI and contracts, and the CLM world in particular is seriously brutal at the moment with so many players in the space GCs and legal ops heads must be hard-pressed to pick one to go with.
The company stated that they believed the key to their success was VerifAI, SpotDraft’s AI-powered contract review tool, which can run entirely locally. This includes ‘embeddings, clause extraction, risk scoring, and applying edits’. While the application requires internet connectivity for sharing, login, and license checks, contract review, risk scoring, and editing execute completely offline on the local machine’, they added.
Shashank Bijapur, Co-founder and CEO, SpotDraft, commented: ‘This investment validates the architectural direction we’ve taken with SpotDraft. Legal teams handle some of the most sensitive business information, yet most AI tools still require sending that data to external cloud models. We’ve developed the SpotDraft platform to run core contract intelligence workflows locally on device, giving legal teams AI capabilities without compromising performance, privacy, security, or control.’
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And, as noted, Tradespace has raised $15m to ‘scale its AI-native IP platform – the first solution that allows enterprises to take control of their full IP lifecycle’, they claimed.
It too is part of an incredibly competitive market space, with more and more IP and patent-related startups coming to market, or older ones seeing a new growth phase, because of genAI’s language understanding capabilities.
For Tradespace, their USP is that ‘by integrating AI directly into the R&D workflow, it streamlines patent development – from invention harvesting to application drafting – allowing in-house attorneys to operate with the speed of a tech company while maintaining legal rigour’.
Alec Sorensen, CEO and Co-Founder of Tradespace, added that he has some thoughts on how IP work connects to the billable hour. He commented: ‘The billable hour acts as a tax on innovation, forcing companies to decide which ideas to protect based on budget rather than merit.
‘Even when law firms have moved to fixed fees, companies have had to pay in other ways, whether in increased costs on the backend for prosecution or lower speed and quality. Our platform allows IP teams to recapture their budget and operate with the speed of a software company, not a law firm.’
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Is this a big deal? These may not be Harvey- or Legora-scale investments, but the flow of investor money into legal tech is looking very positive at the start of 2026.
Although the ‘AI bubble’ thesis has been floating around for a while, most funds seem to view this as more about the risks related to data centre over-investment, rather than doubting that legal AI has a huge opportunity for growth in what is an approximately $1 trillion global legal market.
Legal tech as a fraction of this total remains tiny. And despite what we read about Big Law firms and Fortune 500 legal teams lapping up the latest tech, the majority of the legal market – planet-wide – still has a huge amount of untapped potential in terms of buying legal AI tools across a wide range of needs. In short, even now, it’s still early days for legal AI use.
The challenge, as noted, is not so much the money at present – at least for some – but rather getting heard and noticed by a buyer group that has an increasing level of choice.
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More about SpotDraft here.
And more about Tradespace here.
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