SEATTLE – June 17, 2021 – Lexion, an AI-powered contract management system, announced an oversubscribed $11 million Series A round led by Khosla Ventures, with participation from existing investors Madrona Venture Group and Wilson Sonsini, bringing the total invested to $15.2 million. Kanu Gulati from Khosla Ventures will join Lexion’s board. The Seattle based company plans to use these funds to scale go-to-market functions, drive further AI and product innovation, and grow the team, with a mission to offer a simple contract lifecycle management system (CLMs) that just works.
Many CLMs on the market are complex, require an extensive amount of time and resources to implement, and a significant amount of change management to derive meaningful value. Lexion offers the opposite by delivering an intuitive system supported by a cutting-edge, AI-powered backend, that is simple enough for entire organizations to adopt, and takes just days to implement.
“In-house lawyers spend far too much time on mundane tasks like checking if an active NDA exists, or manually filling out spreadsheets to track key dates and non-standard terms in their contracts,” said Gaurav Oberoi, co-founder and CEO of Lexion. “What makes Lexion special, in this rapidly growing industry, is that it’s a sophisticated AI product that’s incredibly easy to use, accurate, and fast, and eliminates rote work by automatically pulling these key data points from contracts. The result is that legal teams spend a fraction of the time on administrative tasks, and more time helping their teammates in sales, finance, and procurement win deals and grow the business.”
According to Gartner, legal departments will increase their technology spend 300% by 2025, and yet only realize 30% of the potential benefit of their CLM investments because of the complexities of requirements gathering, change management, and user adoption. Oberoi believes that Lexion is perfectly poised to capture this demand by offering a pragmatic platform that solves immediate business needs through automation, and without unneeded complex features that go unused.
“We invested in Lexion because their team has the rare combination of deep technical expertise in building sophisticated AI systems, and a proven track record in delivering SaaS applications that solve real problems,” said Vinod Khosla. “This combination of cutting-edge technology, with simple and practical application, is exactly how the value of AI will get realized in corporations, and is why we think Lexion has a winning advantage in this space.”
For two years in a row, Lexion was the only CLM recognized in CB Insights list of the 100 most innovative AI startups. Incubated at the Allen Institute for AI (AI2) in 2019, Lexion built a state-of-the-art NLP system that turns any contract text into structured data and delivers it in an intuitive repository with instant search, reporting, alerts, permissions, and integrations. In the last 6 months, Lexion has seen rapid growth, increasing revenues 400% and bringing on major brands like OfferUp, Blue Nile, and Outreach.
“Lexion is an incredible addition to our toolkit, saving my team hours in filing, finding, and reporting on contracts”, said Nathan Garnett, General Counsel at OfferUp. “Not only was it quick to get up and running with all of our legacy agreements, but it’s also easy enough to use that we didn’t have to spend time on user training and rollout. Their integration with e-signature means all contracts are automatically filed away, and my team can focus on helping drive business results, instead of on administrative tasks.”
Next, the company is expanding its offering to help legal teams manage the entire contracting process. Lexion is rolling out a new workflow module that allows customers to create customized intake forms, track the status of projects, manage drafts, secure approvals, and report on KPIs. Scheduled for full general availability in Q3 2021, Lexion’s end-to-end solution will serve as the hub for data driven legal teams to manage contracts from start to finish, with their signature focus on simplicity and easy adoption.
Lexion is an AI-powered contract lifecycle management system that just works. We’re on a mission to make the lives of legal teams easier so they can focus on more strategic work. We use best in class natural language processing technologies to make it 100x easier for lawyers and other corporate leaders to find the information they need in their contracts fast. Our solution is also incredibly intuitive and simple to implement. We are a spinout of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s artificial intelligence research institute (AI2) and we’re backed by the same investors that funded OpenAI (Khosla Ventures), helped launch Amazon (Madrona Venture Group), and have advisedGoogle (Wilson Sonsini). With a top notch and experienced team from Microsoft, Facebook, Google, AI2, and Amazon, we built a company that CB Insights ranked the #1 most promising AI legal tech startup in the world two years in a row (2020, 2021). Most importantly, fantastic brands trust Lexion to manage their contracts: Outreach, OfferUp, Blue Nile, and many more. Visit https://lexion.ai for more.
