- Icertis, a leading enterprise contract management company announced it raised $115 million in Series E funding at a valuation of more than $1 billion
Icertis — the leading provider of enterprise contract management in the cloud — announced it has closed $115 million in Series E funding. With this funding round, Icertis has become the first Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) company in the world to be valued at more than $1 billion.
And Icertis is considered the CLM category leader due to its groundbreaking AI-infused Icertis Contract Management (ICM) platform and unparalleled success in winning Global 2000 customers. Plus it counts some of the most sophisticated enterprises across all major verticals as well as 5 of the world’s top 10 most valuable companies as its customers. Now Icertis’ ICM platform helps customers worldwide manage over 5.7 million contracts with an aggregate value of more than $1 trillion.
“Companies must re-imagine every business process to compete in today’s hyper-competitive global markets,” said Samir Bodas — the CEO and Co-founder of Icertis. “Nothing is more foundational than contract management as every dollar in and every dollar out of a company is governed by a contract. As the CLM market takes off, we are thrilled to have Premji Invest join the Icertis family, Greycroft double down by co-leading this round, and all investors re-up their commitment as we execute on our mission to become the contract management platform of the world.”
This round of funding was co-led by Greycroft and Premji Invest. And existing institutional investors including B Capital Group, Cross Creek, Eight Roads, Ignition Partners, Meritech Capital Partners, and PSP Growth also joined the round.
“When Greycroft invests in a company, we commit to a long-term partnership and, since leading their Series A round in 2015, we’ve been proud to support Icertis as it transforms the foundation of commerce,” added Mark Terbeek — a Partner at Greycroft. “Over that time, we’ve seen the company become the undisputed CLM leader, acquiring a huge stable of blue-chip customers and generating a return on capital that is among the best we’ve ever seen. We have no doubt they will become the next giant in the enterprise SaaS market.”
Contracts are being digitized for the first time in history — which is allowing enterprises to reimagine contract management and place it at the center of their commercial processes. And the ICM platform (powered by AI) unlocks the commercial value embedded in a company’s contracts.
“As we run a long-term evergreen crossover fund, we look for companies with enduring growth prospects that can execute and thrive well beyond an initial public offering,” explained Sandesh Patnam — the Lead Partner for Premji Invest in the US. “Icertis has all the hallmarks of a company that will grow into a juggernaut – an innovative product that delivers substantial value for customers, deep cash reserves to develop the market and a track record of flawless execution.”
By transforming these static documents into strategic digital assets, enterprises can protect against risk, improve compliance, accelerate business velocity, and optimize commercial relationships over the entire life of the contract.
MGI Research estimates that the CLM market is massive and has a total addressable market (TAM) over $20 billion with SaaS CLM growing at a 31% compound annual growth rate. “The growth in CLM adoption is fueled by digital transformation,” noted Igor Stenmark — MGI Research Managing Director. “Companies are re-focusing technology investments away from traditional ERP/Financial suites towards automating and digitally instrumenting key processes like contract management. Enterprise contract management providers like Icertis are well-positioned to ride this wave.”
Icertis also consistently receives high scores and strong reviews in analyst- and customer-driven assessments. And the company “has continued to improve its CLM product and has acquired a series of Fortune 100 clients as a result,” commented Andrew Bartels — who is the author of The Forrester Wave: Contract Lifecycle Management for All Contracts, Q1 2019. In this evaluation, by Forrester, Icertis received the top score out of all vendors in the Current Offering category along with the highest score possible in the Customer References category.
With this round of funding, it will be used for increasing investment in the industry-leading ICM platform and growing stable of verticalized business applications built on the platform for helping customers increase revenue, reducing costs, improving cash flow, managing risk and ensuring compliance. And it will be used for extending the Icertis Blockchain Framework — which is the world’s first blockchain framework integrated with an enterprise contract management platform for creating practical and transformative solutions to solve real-world business challenges including supply chain transparency, certification compliance, and outcome-based pricing. Plus it will be used for accelerating the infusion of artificial intelligence and advanced cognitive services into the ICM platform to solve previously intractable enterprise contract management challenges that can be uniquely addressed only by these new technologies. Scaling sales and marketing efforts globally to reach every leading company in the world will also be done with the funding along with financing opportunistic acquisitions tied to commercial value generation in contracting.
Icertis has seen a 125% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) over the past four years. And to address this rapid expansion, Icertis opened offices in London, Paris, Singapore, Sydney and Sofia, Bulgaria in the last 18 months thus bringing the company’s worldwide office count to 12. And the company is experiencing more growth than ever and now has customers across all major industry verticals including ABB, Airbus, 3M, BASF, Bertelsmann, Cognizant, Daimler, Humana, Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft, Qantas, etc.
