Contracts are simple instruments — multiple parties come together, and assign their rights and obligations. They abide by the agreement and come back to it if there is a conflict or a breach. The process to handle contracts also started simply with signatures on a piece of paper.
However, with exploding commerce, growing global economy, the volume, frequency, and complexity of these contracts have changed radically. Large enterprises are drafting and managing thousands of contracts monthly with customers (sales), vendors (procurement), and employees (corporate contracts).
The lifecycle of a contract goes through the following phases:
In a workflow using emails, or using first-gen contract management solutions, or using basic solutions such as document management systems, there are several challenges, including authoring, tracking deviations and clauses, and overall contract management. There is limited or no data on cycle times (how long it took to negotiate), insights like meta data (which clauses were changed, how many people read it), risk-scoring (how many people use it as the basis of other contracts), and managing obligations (the key enforcement dates, and renewal dates).
Apart from the lack of visibility, most of current solutions also take weeks to draft and sign the contracts.
These challenges gave birth to the category of Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) software. Players such as Icertis (valued at $2.8B) and SirionLabs (valued at $300M) emerged to build for this category.
While the benefits of moving from an analog, pen-and-paper approach to a digital approach are truly transformative, there is still a massive under-penetration (<10%) of contract lifecycle management software. Existing players are largely focused on enterprise-wide implementation, requiring longer implementation cycles, and complex integrations.
Why Kalaari invested in SimpliContract
The global CLM market is $1.5B today and expected to grow to $5.2B by 2027. With a strong founding team and extensive customer research, SimpliContract has built an enterprise-grade solution, that is ripe for capturing a significant part of the market:
- It supports all kinds of contracts and is highly configurable for business demands.
- SimpliContract addresses all the stages of the contract lifecycle, from Request to Renewal, including intelligent and powerful workflows.
- SimpliContract is simple and intuitive for users with vast features and deep integration for enterprise-wide implementation.
- SimpliContract AI features like SimpliMine, SimpliXtract, and SimpliSuggest provide contextual search, extract data from contracts and provide risk scoring and contract performance.
Evolution of Enterprise Software
Enterprise Software, globally, and across categories, is moving from plain systems of record to systems of engagement and systems of intelligence. The latter has created enormous value. SimpliContract is riding on this wave.
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With vertical strategy, enterprise-wide rollout, and deep AI capabilities, SimpliContract can command higher ACVs to become a significant player in the CLM market.
The founders come with several decades of experience and the right blend of sales, product, and technology backgrounds.
Guru has 26 years of experience with leadership roles in AWS and Microsoft. He has led Corporate Strategy, Sales, BD, and Global Expansion projects for the Enterprises.
Jinaraj is a product engineering specialist with hands-on experience in AI (NLP). He is a serial entrepreneur, and has spent 20 years in the tech industry.
Makesh has spent time at Microsoft and Cognizant, working on Product and Business Strategy.
Ravinder Singh and Chirag Gandhi from Kalaari form the deal team for Simplicontract. The founding team’s vision of solving a large problem, combined with the validation and traction with their early enterprise customers, made us stand up and listen to them. Their deep experience in building world-class products, and scaling it to international markets, is what drove us to partner with them.
Thank you —Guru, Makesh, and Jinaraj — we are honored to support you in realizing your vision of creating a category-leading SaaS product.
Alongside our partners at Picus Capital, Arka.vc, and Sparrow Capital, Kalaari led a $1.8M seed round in SimpliContract.
From Guru, CEO of SimpliContract: “Kalaari was really convinced about the market opportunity and had deep conviction in our ability to scale SimpliContract into a global SaaS company. Their logical yet humble approach and swift response helped us to see value in our partnership.”
Kalaari Capital is an early-stage, technology-focused venture capital firm based out of Bengaluru, India. Since 2006, Kalaari has empowered visionary entrepreneurs building unique solutions that reshape the way Indians live, work, consume and transact. The firm’s ethos is to partner early with founders and work with them to navigate the inevitable challenges of fostering ideas into successful businesses. At its core, Kalaari believes in building long-term relationships based on trust, transparency, authenticity, and respect.
If you are an entrepreneur (or know an entrepreneur) building a company in the SaaS space, please write to us at saas@kalaari.com
Wish to work with SimpliContract? They are actively hiring for developers, AE specialists and more. Drop an email at hello@simplicontract.com