Evisort, a Boston-based artificial intelligence (AI) contract management company, has raised $4.5 million in seed funding led by Village Global and Amity Ventures. Serra Ventures participated in this round along with industry executives from Accenture, Ropes & Gray, SAP, and Walt Disney. Some of Evisort’s customers include Stack Overflow and Travelzoo.
“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 Evisort CEO and co-founder Jerry Ting in a statement. “I’m excited to enter Evisort’s next chapter and continue building out our AI technology.”
Founded in 2016 by Harvard Law and MIT researchers, Evisort helps professionals across all contract-handling roles to easily categorize, search, and act on renewals and expiration dates for contracts of any type. Evisort’s artificial intelligence platform understands meaning and context in legal language, which eliminates the need for manual data entry and parsing of contracts or business documents.
The demand for automation of contract management such as approving sales contracts to managing documents across legal, procurement, operations, and finance teams have been rapidly increasing. And Evisort’s funding further validates the need for contract management automation. Currently, many companies are still relying on manual and expensive processes, which is leading to workflow inefficiencies and inaccurate records.
“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,” added Amity Ventures general partner and co-founder Patrick Yang. “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.”
Companies can use Evisort’s sophisticated artificial intelligence to automate tedious contract work spanning all legal documents and can track over 50 data points without training. Plus the company will improve revenue and expenditures beyond what is achievable via manual data entry and tracking. For example, attorneys could potentially review 30-page contracts in under six seconds by pulling out relevant legal and business terms.
“Evisort has transformed document management for our legal department, which has increased our efficiency significantly,” explained Stack Overflow Senior Corporate Counsel Adam Francoeur. “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.”
In the past year, Evisort quadrupled its team to meet the growing demand from organizations across all industries, sizes, and geography. Evisort will be using the capital to further develop its artificial intelligence capabilities, including the launching of a new automated review solution for contract negotiations in the second quarter of 2019.
“Evisort is driving a shift in how organizations think about contracts and document data,” noted Legion CEO and former SAP EVP and chief product officer Sanish Mondkar. “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.”
