Today, I’m excited to announce that Ironclad has raised over $11M across our Seed and Series A rounds of funding, with Accel Partners leading our most recent financing. Steve Loughlin, founder of SalesforceIQ and Accel partner, has joined our board. Steve’s tremendous experience advising companies like Palantir Technologies and building companies that augment human potential will be hugely valuable as we grow our company in the coming years.
At Ironclad, we make contracts software that today’s legal teams need to do their jobs. Modern legal teams are inundated with contracts requests from all sides. Sales wants dozens of SOWs or MNDAs to be completed on a given day, marketing wants to know which customers have agreed to share their logos, HR wants to get offer letters signed, sealed, delivered.
Other departments have tools that eliminate the disheartening, administrative drudgery that slows productivity and dampens creativity, tools that ultimately let them participate in business decisions and contribute to revenue. Legal teams don’t—and so they are cast out as non-strategic cost centers, drowning though they might be in external demands and paperwork.
As a corporate attorney at Fenwick & West, I experienced firsthand the pressure that all legal teams bear just to keep pace with the demands of modern business. Performing the simplest diligence takes months, even though much of the actual work is manual: searching through binders of contracts, passing red-lines back and forth, reviewing databases for keywords. Contract drafting and negotiation is, for lawyers, largely administrative: cleaning up terms, correcting misspellings, identifying correct templates, sending out emails.
This isn’t the type of work that most lawyers go to law school for, and is perhaps one of the reasons why lawyers are becoming disillusioned with the profession and leaving in droves. The rote, tedious work better left to a robot—who feels neither boredom nor the toll boredom takes on accuracy—is still being done by people. People who have better things to be doing with their time, both during and outside of work, than manually searching for every agreement from January 1, 2015 – January, 1, 2017, with a particular trademark clause.
What we’ve done so far
With our seed funding, we focused on building a product that legal teams love using. By “love,” I mean that they find the product delightful, easy to use, and hard to live without. At a high level, Ironclad does two things:
- It automates away all the manual, error-prone work that starts with choosing the correct contract template and ends with sending contracts out for signatures.
- Ironclad tracks metadata about all contracts in a centralized repository, so that everyone maintains a single source of truth about important contractual data.
At companies like Gusto, HotelTonight, GoFundMe, Glassdoor, and Procore, legal teams are getting their contracts done faster and more accurately, all while maintaining a single source of truth regarding contract contents. We’re excited to share with you, in the coming weeks, stories about how customers are using Ironclad to do amazing work. For now, I’ll just say that my team is incredibly fortunate to have started our company with customers alongside of us who inspire us to build software that will help achieve great things for their organizations.
Today, Ironclad is a product that augments the capacity of every person on a legal team and grows the usable intelligence available to every person in a company surrounding their contracts.
What’s next
With this latest $8 million funding round, we are focused on aggressively—but thoughtfully—growing our team and our market share. This quarter, I am personally making it a priority to recruit outstanding women and men to join an already incredible team of exceptional, hardworking, and quirky team of lawyers, creators, and engineers.
We’ve built a really incredible product, but there are still brand-new problems that emerge daily in legal, and with them, so many ways to solve them. In a similar vein, we also have a lot of work left to do to spread the word—about our mission, the problems we encounter in legal, and our solutions.
There’s so much work left to do, and we are looking for lawyers, legal professionals, engineers, designers, and storytellers who can help us execute towards our vision, articulate tomorrow’s problems, and propose the answers.
There’s so much work left to do before we get where we’re going. But where we’re going is someplace big.
Ironclad is not a law firm, and this post does not constitute or contain legal advice. To evaluate the accuracy, sufficiency, or reliability of the ideas and guidance reflected here, or the applicability of these materials to your business, you should consult with a licensed attorney. Use of and access to any of the resources contained within Ironclad’s site do not create an attorney-client relationship between the user and Ironclad.
