SpotDraft Uses AI to Enhance Contract Management Efficiency

Surveys are showing that more and more legal professionals are jumping on the AI bandwagon. According to a recent poll by legal tech company Clio, a whopping 79% of law firms used AI for casework last year, a huge jump from just 19% back in 2023. Even though some folks are still a bit skeptical about the tech, in-house counsel seems pretty interested. One survey even suggests that nearly half of attorneys believe AI could save their departments some serious cash.

With the demand for AI in the legal world growing, legal tech providers are springing up all over the place. One of these newer players is SpotDraft, which got started in 2017 and focuses on contract automation and management software. They're all about helping in-house legal teams make their contracting tasks a whole lot easier.

The early team at SpotDraft included Shashank Bijapur, Madhav Bhagat, and Rohith Salim. Bijapur, who's now the CEO, came up with the idea for SpotDraft while he was working as an associate at White & Case, a law firm in Bengaluru that dealt with tons of corporate contracts.

SpotDraft's platform uses AI to pull out key details and clauses from contracts, giving summaries of changes and suggesting what to do next. They've got this unified task center that shows upcoming deadlines, renewal reminders, and what everyone's working on, which should help keep things organized — at least, that's the plan.

One of SpotDraft's cool AI-powered features is VerifAI, which uses AI to check contracts against a chosen guide or template. Another feature, ClickThrough, keeps all contract agreements in one spot and lets users search through them and make reports.

SpotDraft is up against some big names like LinkSquares, Lexion (which is owned by DocuSign), Evisort from Workday, and Filevine. But according to Bijapur, they're doing just fine. They've got around 400 customers, and their revenue shot up by 169% last year.

"We think 2025 is gonna be a big year for us at SpotDraft," Bijapur said. "We're all in on using AI more and more in our product to help legal teams work smarter and come up with new ideas."

Investors seem pretty happy with how SpotDraft is growing. This week, the company announced they raised $54 million in a Series B round, led by Vertex Growth Singapore and Trident Partners, with some other big names like Xeed VC, Arkam Ventures, Prosus Ventures, and Premji Invest chipping in.

It probably helps that the whole legal tech sector is seeing a lot more money coming in after a tough few quarters. In 2024, venture capital funding in legal tech hit $2.6 billion, according to Pitchbook, which is a big jump from less than $1 billion in 2023.

With this new round of funding, SpotDraft's total raised is now just over $80 million. They're planning to use the cash for research and development, expanding into new markets, and growing their team of 250 people in New York — their headquarters — and Bengaluru.

Bijapur mentioned that SpotDraft is working on something they call an "agentic solution" to help in-house counsel reach some big business goals. He didn't spill the beans on exactly what it is, but you can bet AI is a big part of it.

"The old way of doing legal work is all about charging by the hour, which can make things pretty inefficient," Bijapur said. "Our agentic solution will work with other tools that in-house teams use, cutting down on the time spent learning and setting up stuff, so they can focus on the big picture."