Why Neon Invested In SpotDraft

“The greatest innovation that lawyers had seen was a patch to Microsoft Word in 1993. And it was called track changes. And fast forward, 30 odd years, you’re still sitting on track changes and emails.” Shashank co-founder & CEO of SpotDraft told me when I first met him 2 years ago.

In 2017, while working as a lawyer, Shashank realised that he was copying words from one contract to an Excel sheet. Meanwhile, Elon Musk was building self-driving cars, which are much more complex than legal contracts. He then decided that legal services need to change the way they are delivered.

And as he started talking to the in-house legal teams at companies, he noticed that every department had its own set of tools and set of automations to make their work easier. But legal was the last to SaaSify itself in any business. And this was the insight that led to the birth of SpotDraft.

But to change a field that has seen the last innovation 30 years ago, you need a founding team with deep domain knowledge, loads of resilience, and great tech chops. And the co-founders of SpotDraft Shashank, Rohith, and Madhav, had all the necessary ingredients. SpotDraft is the all-in-one Contract Management System for legal teams, making business efficient and faster. Thus helping them increase their productivity and revenue at the same time.

But before all this success, they experienced all the phases in the life of a startup. From the thoughts of shutting down, to returning investors money, to working for 18 hours/day for weeks and to now being called as one of the most innovative companies by Fast Company, to selling to global brands like Notion, AirBnB, Strava, Apollo.io, Panasonic headquartered in HSR, Bengaluru.

Today, a majority of Indian fast growth companies and unicorns are on SpotDraft. It’s because speed often decides whether a startup lives or dies. But with legal matters, you also need precision. And with SpotDraft, these high-growth startups can now turn around contracts in less than a day, which reduces their sales cycle and meets revenue targets faster.

But it’s not just startups that love SpotDraft. If you go to the Bengaluru Airport, then right from ordering a cab, paying for the cab, the airport itself and major airlines they are all SpotDraft customers. And the surprising but exciting truth is that with all this success in India 70 percent of their revenue is from Americas & EMEA.

“The search for CLM is never the cheapest CLM. It is always the best CLM. And we are building the best, the Salesforce of Contract Management. We started using GPT-2 when it was announced in 2019. But we didn’t start saying that we would take some existing framework and fit our thing there. We invented the programming language, which is a pseudocode, in which that contract is written. The pseudocode is literally legalese. So we built that in a way in which you could quickly take a word contract and we would have five trained people here who could turn it into a template quickly with if-then-else, conditions, approval mechanism, etc. Computation is happening there as well. And we scaled that.”, Madhav, Co-founder & CTO, SpotDraft

At Neon, we believe that the legal industry is ripe for disruption, and with LLMs, now is the time to build a generational company. To add some perspective, the 200th law firm on AMLAW 200 did more than half a billion dollars of billing last year. And the combined TAM of just these top 200 law firms is a massive number.

We are proud to back SpotDraft on their ambitious journey to leverage GenAI to build a new age delivery platform for legal services. It’s exciting to see how they are changing the way legal services are delivered, where they go from an input metric to an output metric and become an outcome driven service.

To learn more about SpotDraft’s journey listen to Shashank on The Neon Show below