Announcing Ironclad’s Series C, Led by Y Combinator Continuity

I’m proud to share today that Y Combinator Continuity has led our $50 million Series C round.

The Problem

The world’s first writing was a 5000-year-old contract. Since then, contracts have powered our economies, propelled trade, and created centers of culture. Today, there is not a business on the planet that can function without them.

And yet, contracts technology remains surprisingly primitive. In 2019, it is frustratingly difficult for companies to make and manage even simple, rote agreements. What’s more, as contract complexity continuously increases, so too does cost: today, tens of billions are spent every year just to manually extract information from analog documents and perform basic operational tasks.

Digital Contracting Platform: A Modern Solution for a Modern Age

It’s time contracts caught up to the Digital Age.

At Ironclad, we know that contracts—and all the data locked inside them—are a necessary, missing link in the modern business. To unlock their potential, they must be intelligent, automatic, and easy to use. They must be connected to the people and systems that need them, instead of buried in email chains and cluttered folders. They must be a modern solution for a modern time: digitized at every step.

That solution is Ironclad. It’s the first product that turns contracts into living data pipelines by making it possible for information to bidirectionally flow through diverse business systems. Ironclad also makes it dead simple for customers to not just make and track contracts, but also design and implement compliance protocol on their own.

Introducing Workflow Designer 

Today, we’re announcing a feature that empowers legal teams to do all of this on their own, and with lightning efficiency. It’s called Workflow Designer, and it’s an editor that allows any user to quickly create contract workflows to codify their business processes, as well as adjust them on the fly. Nothing like this exists elsewhere. And in a contracts management space where months- or even years-long implementations are standard for basic configuration tweaks, Workflow Designer represents a step change in what is possible for legal teams.

At Glassdoor, for example, Workflow Designer automates thousands of contracts and enables the legal team to design and deploy workflows in under two hours. Fitbit uses it to conduct mass-scale research for the first time. And at AppDynamics, Ironclad ensures compliance by making sure contracts can only get approved if they meet certain criteria.

The Future

If our C-round investors have anything in common, it’s that they can see the future. Sequoia’s investments include Apple, Google, and companies comprising $1.4 trillion in market cap, 22% of Nasdaq’s total market value. And as for Accel, YC, and Emergence, they were early believers in Facebook, Airbnb, and Salesforce, respectively.

Our investors believe Ironclad is the future because we say what we mean and do what we say. We focus on the fundamentals: building up data foundations for robust artificial intelligence, for example, rather than paying lip service to a trend. Our philosophy is simple: the key to ushering in the future of contracts is building a product that legal teams can’t live without today. And we’re confident we can deliver that solution because our team isn’t just brilliant; they also care deeply about our customers, and are being led by folks who have experience at the helm of departments at companies like Salesforce, Facebook, and Adobe.

A signed contract isn’t a destination. It’s an agreement that paves the way for cooperation and partnership moving forward. I think of our funding in the same way. With our new investment, we’ll accelerate our expansion across geographies and industries, build capabilities that illuminate contract data and processes, and empower legal teams to do more.

We’re on a mission to power the world’s contracts by building the product legal teams love. We can’t wait to show you what’s next.