SpotDraft taps AI to help streamline contract management
More and more legal professionals are embracing AI, surveys show. Per a recent poll from legaltech company Clio, 79% of firms used some form of AI for casework last year, up from just 19% in 2023. Despite some skepticism of the tech, in-house counsel has shown an interest, as well, with one survey suggesting that nearly half of attorneys think AI can yield cost savings for their departments.
Legaltech providers are popping up left and right to meet the demand. SpotDraft, which focuses on building contract automation and management software, is one such relative newcomer. Founded in 2017, SpotDraft sells tools to help in-house legal teams simplify their contracting tasks.
Shashank Bijapur, Madhav Bhagat, and Rohith Salim were on SpotDraft’s launch team. Bijapur, the company’s CEO, says that the idea for SpotDraft came to him while he was an associate at Bengaluru-based law firm White & Case, which dealt with high volumes of corporate contracts.
SpotDraft’s platform uses AI to extract key details and clauses from contracts, providing summaries of changes and suggested follow-up work. A unified task center shows upcoming deadlines, renewal reminders, and individual and team jobs, helping orgs stay organized — at least in theory.
One of SpotDraft’s AI-powered features, VerifAI, taps AI to review contracts against a selected guide or template. Another, ClickThrough, keeps all contract agreements in a dedicated, centralized repository, and lets users search across and make reports with them.
SpotDraft competes for clients against vendors like LinkSquares, DocuSign-owned Lexion, Workday’s Evisort, and Filevine. But it’s holding its own, according to Bijapur. SpotDraft currently has around 400 customers, and the company’s year-over-year revenue grew 169% last year.
“We believe 2025 will be an inflection point for team SpotDraft,” Bijapur said. “We’re strongly committed to deepening the use of AI in the product to help legal teams unlock efficiencies and drive innovation.”
Investors seem pleased with SpotDraft’s growth trajectory. This week, the company announced that it raised $54 million in a Series B round led by Vertex Ventures Singapore with participation from Trident Partners.
It probably didn’t hurt that the broader legaltech sector is seeing an infusion of funds after a rough few fiscal quarters. In 2024, VC funding in legaltch reached $2.6 billion, per investment database Pitchbook, up from a decline of less than $1 billion invested in 2023.
Bringing the company’s total raised to just over $80 million, the new cash will be put toward R&D, market expansion, and growing SpotDraft’s 250-person workforce across New York — SpotDraft’s HQ — and Bengaluru.
Bijapur says that SpotDraft is developing an “agentic solution” to help in-house counsel achieve “strategic business outcomes.” He wouldn’t reveal exactly what form this solution will take, but unsurprisingly, AI is involved.
“Traditional legal work is bound by the ‘dollars by the hour’ model, where inefficiency is often baked into the system,” Bijapur said. “The agentic solution will interact with other tools that the in-house team uses. This will reduce the amount of time spent on learning and configuring tools, allowing the team to focus on strategic work.”
