Dealing in contracts typically means negotiating all sorts of legal and logistical unpleasantries, like endless back-and-forths between parties and copious legal review. And it can significantly drag down the corporate bottom line — contract management cost companies $153 billion per year, according to IT market analysis firm Aberdeen Group.
Virtualization and digital collaboration tools promise to simplify the process, and four-year-old San Francisco-based Concord is gunning to become the suite of choice for sales, legal, and procurement. The startup today announced a $25 million Series B funding round led by Tenaya Capital, with participation from previous investors CRV and Alven. As part of the arrangement, Tenaya Capital partner Paul Drews will join Concord’s board of directors.
Concord CEO and cofounder Matt Lhoumeau said the capital would be used to expand the company’s footprint. It currently has offices in Paris in addition to the Bay Area, with an eye toward international expansion.
“This funding round will deliver flawless scale and expanded platform capabilities,” Lhoumeau told VentureBeat in an email. “We plan on tripling head-count across product development, sales, and marketing teams. We will begin rolling out new platform features as early as next month.”
June 5th: The AI Audit in NYC
Join us next week in NYC to engage with top executive leaders, delving into strategies for auditing AI models to ensure fairness, optimal performance, and ethical compliance across diverse organizations. Secure your attendance for this exclusive invite-only event.
Above: Concord’s compliance flow.
Lhoumeau said the idea for an end-to-end contract management platform came to him at a previous employer, where he was tasked with renegotiating over 500 vendor agreements. Many of the necessary paper contracts and documents were missing, and it took a 52-column spreadsheet, hundreds of files, and four months’ worth of emails and phone calls to get it all sorted out.
Never again, he resolved.
“Once companies experience the digital transformation of their agreement and contracting processes, the ‘Concord effect’ quickly extends outside the legal department,” Lhoumeau said. “Our enterprise customers are bringing their entire finance, procurement, and sales environments onto the platform. This horizontal growth will have a powerful multiplier effect on platform adoption.”
Concord’s platform allows stakeholders to hash out clauses internally and with third parties, all while tracking in-document changes, and to manage every step of the process — including origination, close, and negotiation — in a web dashboard that integrates with cloud storage and customer relationship management services. A streamlined approval workflow helps automate compliance and push updates in the right direction, and version control allows contributors to quickly view all versions of a document.
Other spotlight features include a discussion panel, access control, user permissions, native e-signature support, automated templates, deadline and renewal reminders, and real-time compliance recommendations.
Above: Collaboration tools.
Concord’s tools are used by Stanford, Kickstarter, Newell Brands, Barracuda Networks, Bitdefender, Rent the Runway, Sizzling Platter, Just Eat, Thredup, the U.S. Department of Transportation, Harry’s, and more than 180,000 others, according to Lhoumeau. And if this past fiscal year is any indication, it’s the start of a trend — the startup recently announced 300 percent year-over-year revenue growth.
“The contract management category is ripe for digital transformation by a software company, and we believe Concord is perfectly positioned to lead that charge,” Drews said. “With 95 percent of contracts managed manually, organizations struggle with the ensuing business inefficiencies and vulnerabilities. Matt Lhoumeau and his leadership team have already steered the company into a leadership position in the contract management market. We are excited to partner with Concord as it scales and builds a global, category-defining company in this multi-billion dollar market.”
