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LinkSquares benefits from the legal tech boom with a fresh $100M

Demonstrating that there’s a robust market for contract management solutions, LinkSquares, a company developing intelligent software that helps brands maintain and ink new contracts, today announced that it raised $100 million in Series C financing led by G Squared. The tranche, which had participation from new investor G2 Venture Partners as well as existing backers, brings the startup’s total funding to $161.4 million at an $800 million valuation.

“With this new investment, we will continue to grow our business with in-house legal teams, continue to grow our presence in international markets, like Canada, the U.K. and Australia, [and build a] multi-product suite that expands beyond contract lifecycle management into other use cases for in-house legal teams,” CEO Vishal Sunak told TechCrunch via email. “[We] think that … there’s an opportunity to build more products that the entire legal team can use in areas like intellectual property management, outside counsel, [and] governance risk compliance.”

Founded in 2015, LinkSquares was inspired by Sunak’s and Chris Combs’ work with contracts and due diligence over the course of a company acquisition. Combs was leading business development at Backupify when it was acquired by data backup company Datto, now owned by Vista Equity Partners, in 2015, while Sunak was serving as Datto’s operations director.

“During that time, it was all hands on deck as [Backupify] lined everything up to support the acquisition,” Sunak explained. “Datto hoped to migrate Backupify’s customer data to their cloud infrastructure. However, one obstacle to this business goal was to understand each individual signed customer contract, and determine if Datto had the right to move the data without permission. The idea to review each contract, read the provision related to data transfer, and store the answer seemed straightforward — at first. In reality, because Backupify had negotiated more than 2,000 contracts, the act of finding all the contracts and looking for the provision language was an impossible undertaking.”

As it turned out, Backupify wasn’t the only company struggling to surface insights from its contractual agreements. According to World Commerce & Contracting, nearly 40% of organizations don’t have a clear idea of who’s responsible for their contracts internally. Unaffiliated, earlier research from the Blickstein Group suggests that most organizations track only basic contract management metrics like volume by customer, partner, program type and geography.

Combs and Sunak sought with LinkSquares to build a platform that combines legal analysis with sophisticated contract lifecycle capabilities. Leveraging AI and “the expertise of top legal customers,” LinkSquares helps companies to write contracts, analyze what’s in existing documents and collaborate with other teams across the organization, Sunak says.

Written by Kyle Wiggers