It’s Halloween. And, if you’re contract management software company Icertis, it’s payday. In the year After raising $115 million in 2019, Icertis raised $150 million today — $75 million in convertible debt and $75 million in a revolving credit facility — bringing the company’s total capital to $520 million.
By going the debt route, Icertis avoids answering the difficult valuation question in a particularly challenging economic environment. (Icertis was valued at $2.8 billion in March 2021 and was reported to be as high as $5 billion earlier this year, but tech valuations are falling sharply.) Convertible debt allows Icertis to pay off its debt obligations with stock, while the credit facility It allows him to borrow and pay continuously.
CEO Samir Bodas was vague about the new fund’s plans, but told TechCrunch in an interview that it will use tools like artificial intelligence, natural language processing, machine learning and blockchain to provide unique and valuable value to customers. That’s all very ambitious (and, frankly, a bit wishy-washy), but Bodas asserts that Ecertis is well-positioned to fend off rival startups in the fixed-contract management space.
“Industry analysts such as Gartner and Forrester refer to our category as contract lifecycle management (CLM), but Icertis differs from traditional CLM vendors,” said Bodas. “Not only do we provide efficiencies in contract creation and negotiation, but we use AI and natural language processing to organize data into on-demand data and connect that data to operational systems…
In the year Founded in 2009 by Bodas (veteran of Microsoft and Aztecsoft) and Monish Darda (formerly an executive at BladLogic), Icertis offers cloud-hosted tools for managing procurement, sales and corporate contracts – including tools that can read and analyze contracts for risk, management reports and automated compliance monitoring. . The platform generates contracts and related documents, extracting information such as contact information and clauses to identify contractual obligations and monitor compliance.
Entered contracts can be used to model business relationships in Icertis, allowing users to identify missing clauses necessary to comply with regulations such as GDPR. Bodas says the AI systems powering this and other features of the Icertis platform are among the most efficient of their kind, capable of processing more than 7,000 different contract types across 11 verticals.
Icertis’ contract management software, which works in the cloud.
“We are creating and leading a new category of technology to automate AI processes and provide insights with structured, linked contract data to digitally remember the purpose of each business relationship and ensure that the intent of those agreements is fully met,” said Bodas.
It’s a bold statement. But it’s true that Bellevue, Washington-based Icertis is one of the larger and more successful contract management software providers to emerge in recent years. Bodas, the company in the year It is expected to release in 2021 with annual recurring revenue north of $100 million and more recently over $200 million in recurring revenue. He declined to disclose the size of Icertis’ client base, but noted that current clients include Microsoft, Boeing, Google, Johnson & Johnson, Sanofi, Mercedes-Benz and Qantas, as well as unnamed public sector agencies.
This year, Icertis partnered with SAP to become the CLM solution of choice for SAP customers. (Alongside SoftBank, SAP owns a minority stake in Icertis.) Bodas says it will create an “ecosystem” of contract management for SAP customers by integrating with SAP solutions such as Ariba, Fieldglass, S/4HANA and SuccessFactors.
“In this economic downturn, we believe that contracts that control every dollar inside and outside the organization will emerge as an asset because they are an invaluable source of business value to reduce costs, manage risk, ensure compliance and drive revenue,” Bodas said. We recognize that the system will recover from this failure and that Icertis is committed to leading it for the long term.
Investors are committed to contract management legal technology for procurement, sales, finance, legal and staffing firms like Ecertis – perhaps because of the huge market it can reach. The contract management lifecycle market is expected to grow from $1.5 billion in 2019 to $2.9 billion by 2024, according to Markets & Markets.
Early adoption metrics are certainly promising, with a recent Bloomberg Legal study showing that more than half of in-house lawyers will be using contract management programs by 2020. Trillion in more than 40 languages and more than 90 countries
“Contracts are an invaluable source of original information – documenting and managing rights and obligations between the company and its suppliers, customers and employees. In other words, contracts provide a single source of truth for business relationships,” Bodas said. They’re turning to Icertis to help them manage inflation as much as possible. Do their contracts have clauses that say when inflation occurs, how often they can raise prices, and by how much they can adjust prices? We deliver these insights in real time, so every right in the company’s contract is maximized.
Among Icertis’ competitors are ContractPodAI and SirionLabs, which raised $55 million in July and $85 million in May for their automation fuel contract management software. Another formidable competitor is LinkSquares, which raised $100 million in April to grow its platform that combines legal analytics with contract lifecycle capabilities.
For what it’s worth, Icertis makes do with scale, with more than 2,000 employees spread across offices in New Jersey, Chicago and elsewhere.
