Blog

December 19, 2019

Welcoming Evisort to the M12 portfolio

Welcoming Evisort to the M12 portfolio

Author

Todd Graham, Todd Graham

I am very excited to welcome Evisort to the M12 portfolio today as a co-lead for their Series A round. Ever since my first meeting with the team—hearing about their vision to modernize the underserved legal contracting and operations spaces with actionable insights—I knew this would be a natural fit for our fund. At M12, we’re always on the lookout for entrepreneurs leveraging technology to disrupt business norms. When Evisort founders Jerry, Jake, and Amine first came together in 2016, they asked one simple question: Can we give time back to teams by automating day-do-day contract management?

Can we give time back to teams by automating day-do-day contract management?

The team couldn’t have been better equipped to find an answer. Jerry and Jake first met at Harvard Law School while Amine was getting his PhD at MIT; they soon realized the opportunity and Evisort was born.

Jerry and I had several meetings before we eventually sat down for dinner with all three co-founders. I usually find myself meeting with lawyers to help work out nitty gritty contracting details or unavoidably long risk assessments. Needless to say, spending time with the Evisort founders was the most thrilling meeting with lawyers I’ve ever had. I was grateful they decided to move forward based on M12’s value proposition and overlooked the subpar quality of food at the hotel airport restaurant in San Mateo where we met – a testament to the ‘get it done’ philosophy that permeates the company. Even though their law careers were relatively short-lived, I could tell they were committed to helping legal teams be more productive and establishing Evisort as the leading contract intelligence solution long-term.

“Needless to say, spending time with the Evisort founders was the most thrilling meeting with lawyers I’ve ever had.”

This investment creates a great opportunity for M12 to contribute to Evisort’s next phase of growth, especially considering Microsoft’s long history in the file management space. In the early 2000s, Microsoft launched a web-based document sharing platform—now known as SharePoint—to simplify server management, promote collaboration, and provide storage. Today, nearly 20 years later, the same product has hundreds of millions of users and thousands of customers worldwide. SharePoint use cases span across all types of enterprise teams as document volumes have multiplied, especially in groups that handle contract management: legal, operations, procurement, etc. With that growth comes the need for deeper intelligence and reasoning across large sets of files to empower workers to be more efficient and less overwhelmed by contract fatigue.

“The technology has already proven to be extremely powerful for advanced analysis and post-signature process optimization with early customers.”

Evisort sits at the intersection of the enterprise contract management and contract lifecycle management markets, using deep NLP to relieve legal and procurement organizations from tedious, risk-prone, manual processes. For example, a user can upload various types of contracts to the platform, and the system will automatically pull out contract parties, amounts, expiration dates, and 50+ key legal clauses. The product removes the need to manually enter data into document management systems and easily integrates with existing file repositories to deliver detailed reporting that empowers better-informed decisions. The technology has already proven to be extremely powerful for advanced analysis and post-signature process optimization with early customers.

We are excited to co-lead this round alongside In Sik at Vertex Ventures, and join existing investors Amity Ventures and Serra Ventures and accelerate Evisort’s growth leveraging the resources of the broader Microsoft team.

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