Evisort, the legal AI challenger taking on the doc review and contract intelligence market, and profiled yesterday by Artificial Lawyer, has bagged $4.5 million in seed funding led by VC funds Village Global and Amity Ventures with participation from Serra Ventures, as well as individuals from Accenture, US law firm Ropes & Gray, SAP, and Walt Disney.

The company, developed by Harvard graduates, already has around 25 staff and has offices in California and Boston. Its focus has mainly been on working with in-house legal teams, and is perhaps most similar in strategy to Seal Software, which has led the field of contract review for corporates.

The $4.5m will help to fund new product enhancements, as well as to grow the team. Although founded two years ago, most of that time has been spent perfecting their technology. Now, like other companies after an intense development phase, Evisort is focused on taking market share.

It hopes to do this by providing an integrated offering to GCs, as well as one that requires no training by the user.

CEO, Jerry Ting, told Artificial Lawyer: ‘We’re excited to continue investing into our deep technology so we can provide holistic solutions for clients. We’re going to be bringing on additional data scientists and engineers so we can take our core models and make them specific to clients and industries. We saw early customer adoption in 2018, and we’re excited to continue partnering with organizations as they explore legal technology solutions this year.’

And earlier he told this site: ‘Evisort is different for a few reasons, mainly driven by the fact that our clients are usually in-house counsel, not law firms. First, our AI is pre-trained. We don’t require our users to help us train our algorithms, which most AI companies in the contract space do.

‘Secondly, we understand that for the in-house counsel, data is only valuable when it is usable in a workflow, which is why we’ve built integrations with systems other departments use, like procurement, finance, accounting, sales, and eSignature systems. If documents are stored inside of a different system, we can analyze the document, generate the meta-data fields, and push it back into the system.

‘Finally, the terms we track are different than other contract AI companies. We track the top legal terms, but we also track financial and business terms that attorneys supporting business units have to help manage. The goal is to be a holistic, end-to-end platform that puts the data in the hands of our users, not hidden behind a strict licensing model.’

He added: ‘I believe the market is over $60+ billion as a standalone market but growing rapidly as most of our clients don’t see our solution as only AI or only legal tech, but instead as business intelligence and automation.’

Commenting on the investment, Patrick Yang, General Partner and Co-founder at Amity Ventures, said: ‘Contracts are foundational to every deal in a business whether it is a purchase order with a customer or a business development deal with a partner. Evisort started by selling to legal teams, but after deploying they would get requests from the procurement team asking to use the platform to manage vendor agreements, or from the human resources team to manage employment contracts.’

‘The demonstrated value across teams and organisations made us thrilled to partner with Evisort as they drive automation and free-up people to do more substantive work,’ he added.

Adam Francoeur, Senior Corporate Counsel at Stack Overflow, which is a client of Evisort, concluded: ‘Evisort has transformed document management for our legal department, which has increased our efficiency significantly. Since the product is AI-based, we can find key documents and we can import contracts more seamlessly. For a small team like ours, this has had a big impact.’