Ironclad Raises $50M To Help Companies Have More Efficient Contracts

To help companies of all sizes have a better legal workflow, Ironclad has raised $50 million in a Series C round led by Y Combinator Continuity. Investors such as Emergence Capital 1, Sequoia Capital, and Accel Partners also participated in the round.

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The San Francisco company helps startups like Away, Nextdoor, and Fitbit onboard a digital contracting process. Services include helping “customers bake complex business processes into their contracts, without needing to rely on outside or engineering help.” The company claims that while traditional contract vendor companies will require a year to implement a workflow, Ironclad lets users deploy “in a matter of minutes,” according to its press release.

This new financing brings the company’s total venture-backed funding to date to $84 million since it was founded in 2014. It will help Ironclad expand into new regions and experiment with new contracting solutions; at this point the company is in 15 countries across the world.

While it did not disclose actual numbers, Ironclad claims that it has increased its revenue by 300 percent, and employee count by 170 percent, over the past year to 120 employees.

Market Opportunity

Last time I chatted with Jason Boehmig, CEO of Ironclad and a YCS15 alum, he gave me two reasons why his market focus, helping companies get better contracting solutions, makes sense.

First, he said it’s one of the last remaining B2B SaaS opportunities. Its customer base ranges from small teams to multinational corporations; and serves legal teams that range from one lawyer to over a hundred.

Boehmig said this “speaks to the versatility of the Ironclad platform and the universal need for digital contracting platforms.”

Next, he thinks contracts will always be a core business logic for the company, and the more streamlined contracts are, the more powerful companies can become. He also added an important element: in-house legal counsel at a startup is rare. The company said that the manual contract process is a $60 billion dollar market opportunity.

And even with the uptick of focus on data governance and legal woes, Boehmig said he only sees companies bring their first in-house lawyer around the 100-person mark.

“Even at 500 employees, and with a Series D secured, some companies don’t have an in-house lawyer,” Boehming said in July. “We definitely see our customers thinking through legal issues on a daily basis, the complexity of the business has exploded recently.”

Last week, Clio, another legal tech startup, raised $250 million to help legal practices work more efficiently. Earlier this year, we unpacked a slew of LegalTech companies trying to make lawyers’ lives easier.

This activity illustrates the viability of optimizing a necessary (albeit onerous) part of almost every business. Startups promising a legal way to say goodbye to the paper and pen mentality, are catching up to the ever-changing pace of the legal world.

Illustration Credit: Li Anne Dias