BOSTON & SILICON VALLEY, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Evisort, anartificial intelligence (AI) contract management company servicing customers like Stack Overflow and Travelzoo, announced today that it raised $4.5 million in seed funding led by Village Global and Amity Ventures with participation from Serra Ventures, as well as industry executives from Accenture, Ropes & Gray, SAP, and Walt Disney.
“Organizations we talk to today are actively looking for automation around contracting, but most store their contracts in shared folders without analytics or the ability to search PDF documents,” said Jerry Ting, Evisort’s CEO and Co-founder. “I’m excited to enter Evisort’s next chapter and continue building out our AI technology.”
The funding further highlights a broad need for automating all types of contract management — from approving sales contracts to managing documents across legal, procurement, operations, and finance teams. Many companies remain reliant on manual, expensive processes to track business-critical information, leading to workflow inefficiencies and inaccurate record keeping that can result in losses worth billions. Businesses stand to lose up to 40 percent of a deal’s value due to ineffective contract governance, according to KPMG research.
“Contracts are foundational to every deal in a business whether it is a purchase order with a customer or a business development deal with a partner. Evisort started by selling to legal teams, but after deploying, they would get requests from the procurement team asking to use the platform to manage vendor agreements, or from the human resources team to manage employment contracts,” said Patrick Yang, General Partner & Co-founder at Amity Ventures. “The demonstrated value across teams and organizations made us thrilled to partner with Evisort as they drive automation and free-up people to do more substantive work.”
With Evisort, companies can use sophisticated AI to automate tedious contract work (spanning all legal documents), track over 50 data points without training, and improve revenue and expenditures beyond what’s achievable via manual data entry and tracking. For example, instead of an attorney reviewing piles of legal documents, Evisort makes it possible to evaluate 30-page contracts in under six seconds, pulling out all the relevant legal and business terms.
“Evisort has transformed document management for our legal department, which has increased our efficiency significantly,” says Adam Francoeur, Senior Corporate Counsel at Stack Overflow. “Since the product is AI-based, we can find key documents, and we can import contracts more seamlessly. For a small team like ours, this has had a big impact.”
“Evisort is driving a shift in how organizations think about contracts and document data,” said Sanish Mondkar, who previously served as Chief Product Officer of SAP. “I've been continually impressed by the Evisort team and the technology they’ve built. They’re redefining workflows and setting-up business departments for greater success. Evisort’s platform is uniquely positioned to forever-change how organizations manage contracts and documents.”
The investment comes on the heels of a banner year for the company as Evisort quadrupled its team to meet growing demand from organizations across all industries, sizes, and geography. Evisort will use the capital to further develop and accelerate its AI capabilities, including launching a new automated review solution for contract negotiations (planned for release in the second quarter of 2019).
About Evisort
Evisort is an artificial intelligence (AI) contract management company that helps professionals across all contract-handling roles to more easily categorize, search, and act on renewals and expiration dates for contracts of any type. Founded in 2016 by Harvard Law and MIT researchers, Evisort’s best-in-class AI understands meaning and context in legal language, eliminating the need for manual data entry and parsing of contracts or business documents. Backed by leading venture capitalists, including Amity Ventures, Village Global, and Serra Ventures, Evisort has offices in Silicon Valley and Boston.
