Contract management system Lexion has raised $11 million Series A round led by Khosla Ventures, with participation from existing investors Madrona Venture Group and Am Law 100 law firm Wilson Sonsini,
The latest funding round brings the total invested to $15.2m. Kanu Gulati from Khosla Ventures will join Lexion’s board. The Seattle based company says it plans to use these funds to scale go-to-market functions, drive further product innovation, and grow the team, with a mission to offer a simple contract lifecycle management system (CLMs) that ‘just works.’
Speaking to Legal IT Insider, Lexion co-founder Gaurav Oberoi said: “We’re going to use the money for more sales and marketing and product expansion. One is investing in our outreach, and the other in expanding our product to add end-to-end workflow.”
Oberoi and the founding team are technologists who met at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2) and who settled on improving contract management for in-house legal teams in typically mid-sized corporates.
Oberoi said: “The problem that Lexion solves is that when we talk to counsel about how they are managing their contracts, we hear they do the most mundane of things: they look at all the documents signed and download them and put them in the right folder. How many times do they get an email saying, ‘do we have an NDA with Amazon?’ or, ‘Is this the right one, help!’ Legal becomes the gopher looking up mundane things, not to mention finance saying, ‘We are going to raise our costs by 7% but I’m sure we had a contract saying we wouldn’t raise it by more than 3%, can you find it?’” And this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Lexion ingests a corporates legacy contracts and directly integrates into the likes of Slack and Salesforce. It replaces what is typically a mishmash of file folders and excel spreadsheets.
The ambition with the new funding is to build out the product to substitute the numerous email chains requesting information with an automated triage system. The idea is that rather than requiring a huge expensive data exercise in order to get started, Lexion can immediately be used on an ad hoc basis. Oberoi says: “Sales will email legal and will get a form to fill that says, ‘You’re done, here is a link if you want to track the matter’. Legal gets a link saying they have a new task – and they can see all of their tasks and drafts. They download in their favourite editor and say, ‘Here is the redline’. Then legal has all of the latest drafts in one place, ready for signature with DocuSign.”
Lexion has a Microsoft Teams integration and is in the MS App Store.
In the last 6 months, Lexion has seen rapid growth, increasing revenues 400% and bringing on major brands like OfferUp, Blue Nile, and Outreach.
Other contract management platforms to raise money in the past few months include Danish company Contractbook ($9.3m) and today (17 June) Finnish startup Contract Mill announced the closure of a funding round of over €1M.
Caroline.hill@legalitlexicon.com