Future Unicorn #234: Lexion
The fastest way to get contracts done right
The Quild Future Unicorn is a weekly product-focused note highlighting early-stage startups with statistically significant signals of becoming unicorns.
Lexion offers a cloud-based contract management system that helps businesses of all sizes manage their contracts more effectively. Its platform is designed to automatically extract key data from contracts, such as expiration dates and renewal terms, eliminating the need for manual review. Lexion's platform also includes analytics tools that provide businesses with insights into their contracts, allowing them to identify trends and patterns.
Founding leadership: Gaurav (CEO), Emad (CTO)
Signals:
Repeat founder
Gaurav founded BillMonk (acquired by Obopay) and Precision Polling (acquired by Precision Polling)
Top company alumni
Gaurav worked at Amazon (1+ yrs) and Survey Monkey (6 yrs)
Emad worked at Microsoft (7+ yrs)
Top university alumni
Gaurav graduated from Rice University (BS)
Emad graduated from Stanford University (MS)
Top investors
Khosla led series A
Madrona led seed
They’re hiring across GTM and engineering
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Product Notes
Pain point and person
According to World Commerce & Contracting, a professional association on contracts, 60-80% of business transactions are governed by written contractual agreements and a typical Fortune 1000 company maintains 20,000-40,000 active contracts at any given point of time. While the entire organization handles contracts in some manner, like employees negotiating their offer letter and CEOs negotiating M&A agreements, the legal team is responsible for reviewing, negotiating, and managing all contracts.
In-house legal teams are often small and nimble. With that many contracts to manage, they are often overwhelmed with contract work. A survey commissioned by legal talent provider Axiom showed that ~80% of in-house lawyers are stressed out and ~50% of those respondents are burned out. So what more specifically are the problems?
Hunting down the final executed version of contracts can be painful because contracts are stored across different employees’ systems
Knowing all obligations at a glance because sometimes new features or terms might be violating existing agreements
Managing and tracking legal work because often job requests come in via email which isn’t a work management tool
Product
Lexion has five capabilities that can be grouped into Contract Management and Contract Creation capabilities:
Contract Management: Repository, Workflow, No-code automation
Contract Creation: Sign, AI contract assistant
Repository - a single source of truth for contracts, AI-powered automatic filing and search, automated alerts for key dates, and quick insights into contract content
Workflows - a central dashboard for managing tasks, approvals, drafts, discussions, and KPI reports related to contracts
No-code automation - a no-code automation designer that allows users to create end-to-end automated workflows. Users can automate tasks such as contract creation, approval, signature, and more based on deal details or task status changes.
Sign - like Docusign. A legally-binding e-signature with tracking.
AI contract assistant - is a new capability that is in beta. This offers inline suggestions for new languages, helps with redlining, allows users to look up clauses from existing contracts or a clause library, and generates simplified summaries of clauses and redlines to aid in responding to questions or negotiating with counterparties.
