We hear from co-founder and CEO Jerry Ting about Evisort’s immediate plans.
Evisort announced on 19 December that it had closed a $15 million Series A funding round led by Vertex Ventures and Microsoft Corporation’s M12 Ventures, with participation by Amity Ventures and Serra Ventures. Microsoft’s involvement in this legal sector fundraise is particularly noteworthy.
Evisort’s cloud-based contract management solution is used to review legal documents like sales contracts and vendor paperwork. Its clients include Brooks Brothers, Cox Automotive, Fujitsu, TravelZoo and Sweetgreen.
“Our goal is to relieve legal and procurement teams from the labor-intensive process of managing contracts and empower them with the insights they need to truly do their jobs. We’re excited to deliver a solution that impacts their day to day and frees them up to do the core work they are experts at,” Jerry Ting, Evisort’s CEO and co-founder said in a statement as the raise was announced. “Legal documents exist well beyond the legal team and automating that paper trail has a direct impact on the speed at which a company does business.”
Evisort’s platform launched in December last year to automate the tedious work of reviewing, assessing, approving, and tracking any legal documents that define a business action or relationships, such as contracts, statements of work, invoices, purchase orders, and SLA or rebate tables.
“Evisort is focused on one of the most labor-intensive systems within mid- to large-sized enterprises and is leveraging a robust AI engine to deliver mission-critical insights,” said In Sik Rhee, General Partner of Vertex Ventures. “By removing the friction these teams face with daily document processing, this elegant and simple use of powerful AI algorithms can impact a company’s bottom line.”
Jerry Ting, founder and CEO
Does Evisort currently market its AI tech in the UK/Europe? If not, do you have future plans to do so? Why or why not?We do. We currently serve global clients with offices around the world and have users all across UK/Europe
Is Evisort helpful to companies which need to comply with government data privacy regulations such as GDPR? Evisort is actively being used by clients to help with GDPR regulation. Users are able to conduct searches for data processing agreements (DPAs) and run reports on vendor contracts that do not have DPAs which may touch consumer data. This report can then be used to build workflows to identify which contracts need to be renegotiated to added DPA riders to comply with GDPR.
Why did you decide to launch a tech company instead of practicing law straight out of law school.
I went to law school because I wanted to work with entrepreneurs to help them start companies. When I was in law school, I began to volunteer in clinics to help local entrepreneurs in the Boston area start companies. That’s actually how I met my co-founder. He was actually my client trying to start a different company. What I quickly realized is that a significant portion of the work I was doing for him was not legal work, but was instead manually reviewing data inside of contracts and policies. It was then that I decided that my passion was more for building solutions than going the traditional route of becoming a lawyer, and I was more excited to help other lawyers become more efficient and effectively for their clients than I was in practicing law in the traditional sense.
Share three or more predictions for 2020.
In 2020, Evisort is looking to go from providing a specialty AI solution to becoming a mainstream platform used for digital contracting. As a part of that mission, we’re building out fully customizable workflows, dashboards, integrations with other platforms like billing, sales, procurement management, and accounting platforms. We’ve already began this initiative in 2019 and saw adoption beyond legal teams like finance and procurement.